Confine Wireless Coverage

orochi_yagami · ‎09-15-2009

Hi Expert,

My client requested to confine the wireless coverage within the office building so that external ppls will not get a strong signal unless it's within the building

My question:

How do achieve this in WLC? By adjusting the power under the radio resource measurement? Or some other settings available to do so?

Thanks

orochi

ericgarnel · ‎09-15-2009

It will take a combination of things:

placement of APs and/or use of directional antennae in certain areas.

do you want to provide an open network or not? that would really determine who can connect to the wlans.

Adjust, survey, adjust and survey again - repeat as needed.

You can also go as far as placing rf blocking materials on the perimeter of the building

Leo Laohoo · ‎09-15-2009

Not easy.

Define "strong"? If office building is close to each other, there is no easy way to prevent your signal to "leak" outside your building's surrounding. It's the nature of radio waves in general. I agree with Eric. In order to minimize the effect of radio leaks, you have to combine AP placements and indoor directional antennaes among other things. I can also think of disable SSID broadcast as another.

The problem is how do you provide coverage to a majority of the building floor space without exceeding the boundary.

orochi_yagami · ‎09-15-2009

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the advice.In fact,i did disable the SSID broadcast on WLC,but it doesn't mean it cannot be scan over the air channel.Currently all the access points are installed and not possible to removed. So actually i'm looking for alternate solution that possible to confined the signal/coverage within the building OR around the building area but not too far away from that.

Leo Laohoo · ‎09-15-2009

Using the WLC, you can manually override the RRM to raise or lower the signal strength and footprint of your radios per AP basis. This will take alot of footwork. Your best bet if for someone with a wireless scanner to walk around taking readings and communicating back to the Admin to raise or lower the signal strengths.

This is one of the consequences if a Wireless LAN Site Survey is done incorrectly or incomplete.

orochi_yagami · ‎09-16-2009

Hi Leo,

When you said we can override the RRM setting,does it mean to override the Tx Power Setting or some other setting in RRM,in order to lower the signal strength?

Thanks in advance.

Leo Laohoo · ‎09-17-2009

My apologies for getting ahead of myself here. By default, the WLC set the Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA) and the Radio Resource Management (RRM) of each of the APs that your WLC manages.

You can over-ride this by setting individual signal strengths and channel to use. Please don't get offended when I say that this is akin to "micro-managing" the APs.

Hope this helps.