Network Management

On a Visual RF floorplan, I draw in walls and mark them drywall, concrete, etc.

I inherited this network recently, and my predecessor was pretty haphazard about drawing walls in. I see several buildings where there are walls drawn on some floors but not others. In particular, I have a dorm where there are no interior walls at all drawn in on the first floor, some walls drawn in on the second floor as concrete and one wing no walls, and on the third floor there are drywall walls drawn between hallways and rooms, but not between rooms.

Visual RF heatmaps look like they are just calculating off the drawn-in walls, and not giving information about what the APs are seeing in use.

The building is basically T-shaped, with four APs on each floor in the hallways -- one in each side of the top of the T, then one in the bottom of the T and one halfway up. The heatmap on the first floor where there are no walls entered shows the red bleeding well into the rooms, on the 3rd floor with the drywall entered shows red bleeding some ways in, and the 2nd floor with the concrete walls the signal isn't shown as going far into the rooms at all.

Now on that no-reported-walls first floor, I see clients distributed pretty evenly over the four APs. On the 2nd floor, most of the clients spend most of the time connected to the one AP in the wing with the missing walls, and the other three APs acquire clients every so often so I am sure that they are working.

On the 3rd floor, with the drywall shown, the clients take the same pattern -- the AP on the 3rd floor that's above the client-full 2nd floor AP is where all the clients collect there, with the other 3 3rd-floor APs being mostly empty but for an occasional one or two clients.

The students on the 2nd and 3rd floors report that they can't connect to the wireless on and off for hours at a time.

Is it possible that our rather slipshod drawing in of walls is actually telling the controllers that the APs have a much worse signal than the APs really have?

I'm puzzled by the behavior...

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Cathy Fasano
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The walls are mainly for predictive, not actual coverage.  The coverage you see for accurately-placed APs should reflect how APs hear each other.  If you have more APs on the map, the more accurate the map will be.  In areas where AP coverage is sparse, it will be much less accurate (an approximation) because there are fewer devices to "hear" how the coverage is in those areas.

Long story short: no need to draw walls.

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Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.
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Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2021 06:56 PM
From: Cathy Fasano
Subject: Visual RF -- is it showing me inputs or outputs?

On a Visual RF floorplan, I draw in walls and mark them drywall, concrete, etc.

I inherited this network recently, and my predecessor was pretty haphazard about drawing walls in. I see several buildings where there are walls drawn on some floors but not others. In particular, I have a dorm where there are no interior walls at all drawn in on the first floor, some walls drawn in on the second floor as concrete and one wing no walls, and on the third floor there are drywall walls drawn between hallways and rooms, but not between rooms.

Visual RF heatmaps look like they are just calculating off the drawn-in walls, and not giving information about what the APs are seeing in use.

The building is basically T-shaped, with four APs on each floor in the hallways -- one in each side of the top of the T, then one in the bottom of the T and one halfway up. The heatmap on the first floor where there are no walls entered shows the red bleeding well into the rooms, on the 3rd floor with the drywall entered shows red bleeding some ways in, and the 2nd floor with the concrete walls the signal isn't shown as going far into the rooms at all.

Now on that no-reported-walls first floor, I see clients distributed pretty evenly over the four APs. On the 2nd floor, most of the clients spend most of the time connected to the one AP in the wing with the missing walls, and the other three APs acquire clients every so often so I am sure that they are working.

On the 3rd floor, with the drywall shown, the clients take the same pattern -- the AP on the 3rd floor that's above the client-full 2nd floor AP is where all the clients collect there, with the other 3 3rd-floor APs being mostly empty but for an occasional one or two clients.

The students on the 2nd and 3rd floors report that they can't connect to the wireless on and off for hours at a time.

Is it possible that our rather slipshod drawing in of walls is actually telling the controllers that the APs have a much worse signal than the APs really have?

I'm puzzled by the behavior...

------------------------------
Cathy Fasano
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