Use Wireless Health Monitor to optimize your WiFi!

What went wrong with your wireless network connection?

After adopting the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 solution, deploying more access points, and even upgrading the network infrastructure, you have done pretty much everything in your power to improve the WiFi performance; however, with the ever-growing demands for WiFi connection, it seems that you just can't simply keep your WiFi users happy. There are many reasons that can affect wireless network performance, but unfortunately IT administrators often lack of a useful tool to detect and fix connection problems and optimize network performance automatically.

Why does a wireless network fail?

As the network complexity increases, the potential for degraded performance looms larger. To ensure a seamless wireless connection, there are countless factors IT administrators need to pay attention to. Here are three typical factors in real-world practice that even top-gear WiFi AP vendor can’t guarantee to fix all these problems:

• Interference: This is a severe problem that can significantly obstruct the wireless network performance. Besides the interference from access point itself, other wireless applications can also introduce co-channel and adjacent interference. And as the popularity of 4G/5G technology increases, indoor antennas are commonly seen in public venues. Although 4G/5G operates in a different band than WiFi, it still introduces interference, which also known as out-of-band interference.
• Congested environments: The biggest challenge in high density venues is interference and overload due to a large number of clients contesting for limited bandwidth.
• Abnormal connections: Sometimes, the problem is from the client device. It could be misconfigured or sticking to a remote access point. Those problematic wireless clients with weak transmitting capability will continually lose packages and keep retrying that occupy air time but never complete the transmissions.

However, it is not easy to evaluate the level of impact of the above factors has on the wireless performance. The result may not be useful for improving WiFi performance because simply there are too many variables to consider in each factor. Nebula Wireless Health overcomes this challenge by using the MAC-layer-based analysis since it not only covers all the impacting factors by processing packet loss or retransmission on the MAC layer in its analysis, but also eliminates the need for additional sensors, making it an ideal choice for accurate wireless health analysis.

Read more:

• Quick overview of Nebula Wireless Health
• Full introduction
• Full introduction in pdf