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RollOut: Ekahau's Site Survey 2.2: Page 2 of 4

Contemporary survey tools, such as AirMagnet Surveyor and the old free standby NetStumbler, may stand alone; others, such as Location Manager in Cisco's Wireless LAN Solution Engine (WLSE), are packaged into management systems. Site Survey is autonomous. To keep the NIC and driver prerequisites simple, Ekahau uses a wide range of off-the-shelf wireless card and driver combinations to gather data and make accurate predictions. Some tools, including Surveyor, require a proprietary driver and tie their tool to a single NIC for licensing purposes.

Past, Present and Future

Common survey-related tasks include planning wireless networks for buildings and spaces that don't yet exist; recording and optimizing the characteristics of an existing WLAN, and troubleshooting isolated spectrum problems that might be due to changes in any given area. Utilities that are built into a management system tend to vary in quality and practical value. The Location Manager module in Cisco's WLSE, for example, shows only simple pictures of a given area. On the other hand, the Wireless Control System (WCS) in the Cisco-acquired Airespace line is surprisingly similar to Ekahau's tools in user-friendliness, though WCS is not as robust.

Whether the goal is evaluating an existing network or planning a new one, good results depend on an accurate representation of walls, furniture, elevator shafts, trees and anything else that can influence the radio signals used in the WLAN. This is where the likes of Cisco's WLSE fall flat and Ekahau's product shines. Site Survey makes it easy to model an entire floor, city block or neighborhood with various attenuation sources.

Ekahau provides nine different building-related attenuation values as walls and such are plotted; sheetrock provides roughly 4.8 dB of loss per layer in the Wi-Fi frequencies, for example. It would be nice to see some attempt at more outdoor features like "big tree" or "wooden fence," though creative planners could probably use some of the existing choices to simulate a wide variety of objects. Lesser tools, like Cisco WLSE's Location Manager, have no provisions for simulating a real attenuation sources and thus are worthless at modeling the WLAN environment.