TABLE OF CONTENTS A considerable amount of testing is performed during the planning and installation of large-and medium-size enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) installations. For example, site surveys are performed prior to installation, and performance qualification testing is done after the equipment has been installed, but before it is allowed to carry live traffic. A wide variety of techniques are in use, along with an equally wide range of low-cost test equipment, during WLAN installation, qualification, and maintenance.
This chapter describes the essential test procedures during the WLAN installation and maintenance process, as well as the types of tools employed. Note that it is not intended to be a primer for WLAN deployment (this is already well covered in many other books), but focuses on test equipment and methodologies.
This section briefly describes the architecture and components of an enterprise WLAN, and the factors to be considered before and after installation. A previous chapter (see Section 6.1.2) also provides some information about enterprise WLANs, and is worth consulting before beginning this one. Enterprise infrastructure equipment, as well as the general enterprise WLAN deployment process, will be summarized for clarity; however, only the testing aspects of deployment will be covered in detail.
The initial deployments of WLAN equipment in the enterprise were relatively small, and used stand-alone access points (APs) connected into the wired LAN backbone; basically, these were merely "wireless extension cords" for the wired infrastructure. This is the distributed approach to WLAN implementation. As the adoption of...
