Networking / Beginners

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Choosing a Flavor of 802.11

One of the more important decisions you will need to make when deploying your wireless infrastructure involves choosing either 802.11a or 802.11b. You get more speed with 802.11a, but 802.11b is much less expensive and much more commonly available. However, if you want to deploy a wireless infrastructure that is going to last for a long time, you may find it much easier to deploy 802.11a. While 802.11a is more expensive at this time, costs are going down for wireless NIC cards and access points. Most important, you gain a significant speed increase from 11 to 54 Mbps. In today's information world, you will require more speed in your wireless infrastructure for multimedia network applications that require more bandwidth.

In order to deploy the most effective solution possible, make certain you understand what capabilities you will need in your wireless structure both today and tomorrow. You can overcome 802.11 security limitations by determining your requirements. One of the factors that makes 802.11 more secure is that it functions in the 5-GHz band. This frequency spectrum is significantly different from the 802.11b use of the 2.4-GHz band, and it is much harder to eavesdrop on the signal with off-theshelf listening equipment.

Defining your requirements is necessary for you to determine what your WLAN is going to provide your users. It is vital that you completely define your wireless infrastructure requirements, or your WLAN won't satisfy your user's needs.

The key requirements you need to consider include the following:

• Wireless range
• Speed and throughput
• Security
• Application software
• Battery life
• Operating system functionality

In order to understand these requirements it is important that you determine what applications you will be running on your network. Many network applications are bandwidth intensive and have increased throughput requirements. Next, you need to determine how many users will be concurrently using these applications. Understanding that throughput decreases proportionally with increased distance from the access point, you also must consider the range your users will need in order to work efficiently over your WLAN.

When you define network requirements, you should consider how many users you are planning for in your WLAN. If you are dealing with only a few dozen workers, it may only take a few hours to determine the necessary requirements. When working on larger projects with several thousand people using a WLAN in a large corporate area, you may need to invest several weeks to survey your users so that you can determine the most appropriate mechanism for your new wireless infrastructure.

It is important for you to be able to plan your wireless infrastructure with enough room for future improvement so you can meet the increasing needs of your corporate users.

When you have determined a fixed set of requirements, then you can concentrate on effectively designing your infrastructure to meet your requirements at the lowest possible cost.

The most important elements that help you reduce the cost to deploy your wireless infrastructure include:

• Choosing a vendor
• Assigning the most effective access point locations
• Designating non-conflicting access point channels
• Determining how to assign security mechanisms to protect your network
• Determining components to meet wireless infrastructure requirements
• Assigning the most efficient wireless configuration

You may find it most appropriate to create a design diagram that describes the specific configuration and components needed to meet your wireless design requirements securely. You design specifications will define how best to plan your wireless devices for secure, optimal reception. You can achieve the best reception by placing the antennas for your access points at higher elevations to get the most range. From a security standpoint, shielding your walls from stray signals from your access points helps you contain your WLAN so that people cannot hack into it or gain access to resources they are not authorized to utilize.