Using different Wlans for Office & Warehouse environments

[gzigoto133]

Hi everybody,

I'm working on a Wi-Fi project, and i would like to have your opinion on a design question.

I have two categories of buildings to cover : warehouses and offices

In warehouses i will have RF Scanners that communicate with a logistics application (local servers in the warehouses)

In office buildings, standard laptops that will be used in offices and meeting rooms and communicate with file servers, email servers, proxys for browsing etc...

I was wondering about the need to create 2 different wlans/SSIDs for the 2 environments. In the previous Wi-Fi architectures that i have seen there were often different SSIDs for Warehouses & Offices, but i can't really see the advantage of doing this.

The RF Scanners are quite recent and support the same security standards that we will use for laprops (i.e. WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TLS authentication and AES encryption)

As there are many local servers in the buildings, the wlans will be H-REAP (or now "FlexConnect") local-switched, so devices will be put in different local vlans depending on their location.

I guess 2 wlans is always more complicated to manage than 1 unique wlan, so as of today I don't really see any advantage of creating 2 wlans.

What do you think about it ?

Thanks in advance for your help

Gabriel

[Scott Fella]

I would use two separate.  You might need to tweak a WLAN setting for the scanners compared to the laptops.  This also give you more flexibility and really doesn't complicate things at all.  Its the best way!

You need to look at also if you end up doing QoS or if you want to support 802.1x on the laptops and the scanners might not support it.  Usng one ssid, limits you to the lowest factor device.... did that even make sense?  Oh well.... hoepfully you understood what I meant:)

[Saravanan Lakshmanan · Accepted solution]

Yes, like Scott mentioned wireless handhelds got specific wlan config requirement. Adding best practices doc.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns414/ns779/C96-609146-00_config_best_practices_for_motorola_st.pdf

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6366/products_tech_note09186a0080ab7c01.shtml

[gzigoto133]

Hi,

Thank you Scott and Saravanan for your answers

Clearly it looks like there are many settings specific for these handheld devices

[Leo Laohoo]

I have two categories of buildings to cover : warehouses and offices

I hope you will be running WLC that can support 7.2.110.0 because there's an option called RF profiles.  You may want to consider, for example, the WAPs in the warehouse to run particular RF profiles while your office run different RF profiles.

The RF Scanners are quite recent and support the same security standards that we will use for laprops

Sorry, but I would be apprehensive to believe what the marketing people say until you've personally tested the roaming of these scanners.  There are still some very expensive scanners which will only talk in 1 Mbps in 802.11 b, PSK, and SSID should NOT be broadcasting.