Forum

I am working at upping my game with better management of my wireless network. I am guilty of doing design, deployment but no post deployment survey to see what it really looks like to my clients.  

Questions about doing my passive surveys:

Is it a good idea to statically set all the radio powers in a particular area during the survey? (Cisco RRM)

Does it matter what data rates are enabled on the radios?

Should I survey all SSID's or just one known SSID on the system?

Thanks

Hi

Glad you see the error of your ways! Validation is the most important design task you will ever do, its proof in the pudding.

Is it a good idea to statically set all the radio powers in a particular area during the survey? (Cisco RRM)

Yes. You should assign you tx pwr as per the values you applied in your original predictive model EVERYWHERE not just in a particular area.This gives a baseline and an assessment of how close your prediction is. Now, you mention RRM.....any design should take into consideration the RRM algorithm if RRM will be enabled. RRM should not determine your design. If you enable RRM then I advise validating again to understand the impact of RRM and if RRM is working for your environment, if it isn't, tweak it, re-validate. Its an iterative process :)

Does it matter what data rates are enabled on the radios?

Yes. When you validate, you are looking for beacons frames. Beacons are mgt frames which are sent at the lowest supported/mandatory rates so make sure you set them.

Should I survey all SSID's or just one known SSID on the system?

by default, a passive survey is scanning/listening for ANY beacons frames transmitted on a frequency band,  and these beacons contain ALL available SSIDs. This is important because you want to detect any APs that are not under you admin control that may also share the medium/channel thus impacting on your design by way of channel interference (CCI)

Hope these brief answers help.