Coverage and Capacity Issues in Enterprise Wireless LAN Deployment

Although Wireless LANs market has grown tremendously in the last few years, their enterprise deployment has been fairly limited. From manual site survey process to ensure adequate coverage to well-known security issues in original standards, there have been several deterrents to widespread enterprise deployment of wireless LANs. In this paper we describe three of the core wireless LAN deployment problems – access point positioning and cell dimensioning, channel allocation, and access point load balancing, and show how existing tools and systems address these problems to provide adequate coverage and capacity across an enterprise. We bring out the similarities between these issues and related deployment issues in cellular networking arena, and discuss various proposed solutions in both contexts. Finally, we survey several advanced architectures that further automate the deployment and management of wireless LANs.