Redundant WLAN Design

[barryfowles]

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me if and when they would use Hot Standby Mode to provide a redundant wireless solution. What would be the problem with a second AP on a non-overlapping channel for an isolated WLAN island, or, a large overlap design where greater wireless coverage is required.

I would appreciate WLAN Netpros views on this.

Many Thanks

Barry

[wdrootz]

This would be more of a design consideration...

[thisisshanky]

Most of the indoor wireless deployments that I have done include hospitals. Some areas in the hospital (especially patient rooms, ICU, OR, Recovery) etc are considered very critical, so the hospital IT requested redundant APs using Hot Standby so that downtime to swap a broken AP can be avoided.

So your question really can only be answered by asking more questions, if you really want high availability in that area, whether you want automatic or manual failover of APs etc.

The down side of using Hotstandby is that you buy twice the number of APs to cover the same area, and wait for the active AP to break, so that the standby AP can be used.

You can approach this situation with an alternative, that is to use Self healing networks using WLSE. So if one AP breaks, neighboring APs will increase their power to cover the areas, that the broken AP was covering prior to failure. This requires a lot of trial and error, as you have to be careful about how much signal overlap happen with other APs, when the network is healing. It can be dangerous at times.