Chapter 8. Management Strategies for Wireless LANs

Wireless networks are usually more challenging to manage than wired networks. The physical aspects of a typical wired network are stable and predictable; the transport medium itself, "the wire," does not change. Wireless networks, however, operate in a very dynamic environment. User experience can differ from day to day, depending upon factors such as the number of concurrent users, interference, multipath effects, and even time of day; for example, the radio frequency (RF) "landscape" of a WLAN will be different at 6 a.m. than it will be at 3 p.m. during a typical working day. Furthermore, because of the unlicensed nature of WLANs, there is always the risk that neighboring networks will spring up to interfere with what was previously a stable environment. Finally, wireless technology is relatively new, and many experienced networking professionals are still unfamiliar with the solutions, challenges, and strategies for carefully managing this environment.

When you take the WLAN's unique physical properties into account, a WLAN can still be considered as simply another transport mechanism. As such, many of the standard management strategies that are tried and tested in the wired networking world are equally applicable to wireless networks; the common themes of fault and configuration management, performance tuning, and operational support need only be slightly modified to ensure that your WLAN is as stable, reliable, and secure as your wired network.

You must also consider the two general approaches to WLAN architecturesthe centralized model and the distributed modeland the tools that are available to you. When considering the specifics of WLAN management, you can view it as having three facets:

• RF management

• Host management

• Client management

However, before delving into these topics, you must address a more fundamental question; that is, you must determine what strategy your enterprise will adopt for wireless network management.