Let your Wi-Fi network do the hard work for you

Wi-Fi networks are pretty darned easy to set up these days - at least if you’re talking about a simple one or two access point network like the ones you might find in a home or very small office. The challenge comes with larger deployments - even with the advances in centralized Wi-Fi gateways and switches, dealing with issues such as site surveys, channel selection, access point power levels and airwave monitoring, to name just a few, gets quite complicated.

Today this issue mainly raises its head in large-scale deployments, like when an enterprise or service provider deploys dozens of access points in a corporate campus;, or when a service provider does an installation in an airport, convention center or hotel. But as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous, even small deployments will face interference and other “cooperation” issues from deployments in adjacent homes, offices or even public spaces (for hot spots). With access point prices trending ever downward, the density of Wi-Fi deployments can only go up.

With the right mix of equipment, engineering and ongoing monitoring, dense wireless LANs can work today. But - and this is a big “but” -  it’s not easy. The real issue is change - new users coming online, changes in usage patterns, even seemingly unrelated events such as moving file cabinets - can all throw into disarray a well engineered network by altering Wi-Fi propagation and access point traffic loads.

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Wi-Fi networks are pretty darned easy to set up these days - at least if you’re talking about a simple one or two access point network like the ones you might find in a home or very small office. The challenge comes with larger deployments - even with the advances in centralized Wi-Fi gateways and switches, dealing with issues such as site surveys, channel selection, access point power levels and airwave monitoring, to name just a few, gets quite complicated.

Today this issue mainly raises its head in large-scale deployments, like when an enterprise or service provider deploys dozens of access points in a corporate campus;, or when a service provider does an installation in an airport, convention center or hotel. But as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous, even small deployments will face interference and other “cooperation” issues from deployments in adjacent homes, offices or even public spaces (for hot spots). With access point prices trending ever downward, the density of Wi-Fi deployments can only go up.

With the right mix of equipment, engineering and ongoing monitoring, dense wireless LANs can work today. But - and this is a big “but” -  it’s not easy. The real issue is change - new users coming online, changes in usage patterns, even seemingly unrelated events such as moving file cabinets - can all throw into disarray a well engineered network by altering Wi-Fi propagation and access point traffic loads.

Most of the solutions to dense Wi-Fi deployments are relatively expensive - industrial strength enterprise Wi-Fi switches or routers that do a great job for large enterprises, but are simply overkill for smaller deployments (typically these switch/routers make business case sense for deployments of 30 access points or more). A start-up called Propagate Networks has recently launched an alternative:  inexpensive, embedded software solutions that make Wi-Fi networks self-organizing.

Propagate doesn’t sell anything that a service provider or enterprise would buy directly, but instead is focusing on partnering with Wi-Fi chip makers, client and access point manufacturers, and Wi-Fi gateway and switch vendors. Propagate sells these vendors nothing more than cheap, low processor-overhead software that can be embedded in any of these systems with very little impact on the vendor’s bill of materials (BOM).

This software, AutoCell, provides self-organization by ensuring that clients associate with the access point, which can provide them with the highest throughput - even if they are not the access points to which they are physically closest. So, for example, a new user who powers up her laptop may end up associating with an access point 75 feet away, instead of the one 25 feet away, if the network loading environment tells AutoCell that she’ll get better performance from the more distant AP. If an AP goes offline, AutoCell automatically “routes around it,”, transferring users to other APs and rebalancing the wireless network load. This is a continuous process, reacting to AP availability, the RF environment and client usage changes as they occur.