Retail Company

The AutoCAD drawing was sent from the retail company to be formatted in LanPlanner. Customer gave the required LanPlanner details of the drawing. Which included, the height of the building, the length of the building (only required if drawing is not scale), and obstruction information. The warehouse building is 30 feet tall roughly 400' in length and roughly 250' in width. The building consisted of 28' racks throughout the warehouse and some office area that will not have RF coverage.

After the the AutoCAD drawing was inserted into LanPlanner software, LanPlanner will format the building. Formatting the building is a crucial part in the site survey process. In order to accurately predict and measure the RF infrastructure the format process must be accurate. The format process consist of telling LanPlanner from the original drawing what type of obstruction is in the building and what the obstruction is made of and the height of the obstruction. With this building the main obstructions were the metal inventory racks.

After the format process, Access Points/Ports can be placed throughout the warehouse. The retail company was predicted to have 7 Motorola AP300's with 2 5Ghz Omni Antenna's for each AP were placed throughout the warehouse. Each AP300 was placed roughly 29' from the ceiling. Each AP300 color represents a channel. For the least amount of channel interference for 802.11b/g, channels 1, 6, & 11 are to be used. Black represents channel 1, Yellow represents channel 6, and Red for channel 11.

With the AP's placed then LanPlanner can predict the RSSI(Received Signal Strength Indication), SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), Channels, and the throughput. For this retail company LanPlanner predicted the 7 AP's would cover the warehouse from 24Mbs to 54Mbs of coverage. In the colored heat map drawing of the warehouse, each color represents a different amount of RSSI or throughput. RED is a -50dBm(dBm is the power ratio in decibels) or can represent any where from 48Mbs to 54Mbs of throughput. YELLOW is a -60dBm or can also represent anywhere from 36Mbs to 48Mbs of throughput. GREEN is a -70dBm or also represented anywhere from 24Mbs to 36Mbs of throughput.

When the install is complete the measurement process takes place on site. LanPlanner software uses a Motorola tested and certified wireless card to take measurements. In the facility the LanPlanner engineer walks around the facility and takes measurements from any given point. LanPlanner records the RSSI, SNR, and or Data rate in real time from the surrounding approved Access Points. For this retail company each RED dot represents a point at which a measurement had taken place. LanPlanner takes the measurements and produces a heat map. The RED color represents -50dBm or 48-54Mbs of throughput as stated in the prediction process, the YELLOW represents -60dBm 36 - 48Mbs of throughput, and GREEN is -70dBm or 24-36Mbs of throughput and BLUE is -80dBm or 11-24Mbs of throughput. It is to be noted that customer requested only at least 11Mbs of throughput throughout the warehouse. The WHITE space in the drawing is indicating where a measurement was not taken. This could be caused by pallets in the way or product on the floor to where a measurement could not be taken.