Wireless Access

Guys,

I have a taks to design a new wireless solution for a warehouse that is under costruction. I have recently read through presentation slides of Chuck's Lukaszewski on the subject Wireless Design for Stores, Warehouses & Manufacturing Facilities. Great reading, but due to lack of experience I am asking for your opinion on the matter.

We will have a warehouse with normal and controlled temperatures, etc. It will contain high stack shelves with paper/cardboard supplies mainly for packaging. Please see attached simple schematics.

Although wireless is intended for barcode scanners, we would like to use both 2.4 and 5GHz bands for future needs. From Chuck's presentation it looks like using down-tilt omni antennas/APs is best approach.

Question is, how wolud you suggest to place APs, based on your experience?

Every passage?

Every second passage?

How they should be aligned:

 - in the middle of passage width (right between shelves, LoS in that passage, what signal will be in second next passage, on the other side of the shelf)?

 - or in the midde of shelf width (right on top of shelf, no LoS in next to passages)?

Legend:

- dimensions are on the schematics

- ceiling is at 49 ft (15m) everywhere

- shelves (with goods stacked) will reach 39 ft (12m) max.

Thanks,

You would need to do a mini-survey to see how far RF propagates (1) Down each aisle and (2) how many aisles over.  Downtilt omnidirectional antennas are the way to do this, yes.

Every warehouse is different, so the exact materials in stacks/product can vary based on whether they are full or empty, or solid, liquid or just paper.  In the Aisle, I would place a single access point and do a survey in the next aisle and the next aisle after that to see how far is propagates.  I would also do a survey in the same aisle.

In the same aisle, typically you can get good coverage with an AP every 100 feet, or even more.  I have never seen a warehouse that needed an AP in every aisle;  Try it every other  and every third aisle to see your coverage before you deploy.

I agree with Colin and wanted to share my experience on this. I have a customer who has two large commercial warehouse spaces that we deployed a solution for. Each space is ~50K sq ft with 40 ft ceilings. They have several aisles of metal racks in each. What we ended up doing was staggering the access points. Row 1 - AP at the end, Row 2, AP in the middle, Row 3, AP at the far end. We repeated this pattern as needed and they have excelent coverage in their warehouse area.

I'll underscore both previous answers.

We have high-bay warehouses with food products and get pretty good coverage through the racks, so we place an AP at one end of an aisle, then middle of next and far end of third - repeating until we run out of aisles.

In our freezers, we switch to one AP at the 1/3 point on one aisle and 2/3 point on the next - repeating until the end.

The difference being that pallets of ice are very nearly WIFi-proof and we get much less coverage ni the adjacent aisles.

Your product opacity to WiFi will dictate how good adjacent aisle coverage will be. Test it before taking any of our other advice.