Site Surveys

[vosm]

I am conducting some inside site surveys, I have a lot of documentation on doing a survey and have good equipment but one question I have is what should be the minimum signal strength or quality that I want to look for? For example I am thinking that a signal strength of 10 percent is as low as I want to go and would consider that the edge of the range for that access point. I am just wondering if there is a suggested limit or rule to go by.

Thanks for your help in advance.

[ndoshi]

Hi ,

It depend upon how much bandwidth is required for your application .

As you move away from AP , throughput decreases from 11 to 5.5 to 2 to 1 .

Now Signal Stregth is DIFFERENT THAN singnal quality . Good Signal Strength does not mean always good singal quality .

What you should look for is SIGNAL QUAILITY . Multipath reduces signal quaility .

I would day keep more than 30% signal quality . There is no guide line for deciding this threshold . It is upto your desing that how much overlap you want between two adjacent cell .

Roaming of users not only depend on signal strength and quality it is also depend on # of hope the backbone is away and other factors ....

I hope this helps ....

[vosm]

The tool I am using it is easier to see strength than quality. I have always been putting more emphasis on quality because you are right that quality is more important than strength. We have a Fluke Optiview with the wireless option and it does a good job showing strength and throughput. The big point you pointed out is application requirements which not only is going to be hard to measure, we have a lot of different users with different requirements.

Thanks for the info and stimulating some more thought on this.

[thomas.tucker]

Our rule of thumb is a minimum Mb connection. As an example, we will guarantee at least 2 Mb at any location that is covered by wireless. This works well for us. Keep in mind that the type of device you are using makes a big difference too. We use mostly hand held units for our warehouse operation. The radio is not as strong as a laptop with a wireless NIC. With this in mind, we survey with the hand held unit.

[manjeets]

Please find the attached document.