WLAN Management involves three primary functions:
- Discovering the WLAN devices
- Monitoring the WLAN devices
- Configuring the WLAN devices
WLAN Management Function 1: Discovering the WLAN devices
Any WLAN Management software would try to discover the WLAN
devices, but the effectiveness varies with the approach taken.
Few software depend purely on the wired side information resulting
in partial discovery of the WLAN devices. The wired side information
help in discovering high-end access points, which have proper
SNMP support, but not those SOHO grade ones that often bring
security problems. To overcome this problem, WiFi Manager
employs multiple techniques such as ICMP, SNMP, Telnet, CLI,
AP Scan, RF Scan, CDP etc., to discover devices in your WLAN.
The dedicated RF sensors that come as additional hardware
components with WiFi Manager perform the RF scan and discover
every element that is transmitting on the air and ensures
a 100% complete discovery of WLAN devices.
WLAN Management Function 2: Monitoring the WLAN devices
Monitoring can be several folds starting with the basic availability
monitoring to fault monitoring, performance monitoring, and
service monitoring. Standard WLAN management software would
provide you with basic availability monitoring that tells
you whenever a device goes down. Advanced WLAN management
software such as WiFi Manager will provide you with detailed
monitoring functions such as:
- Trap reception: When the WLAN device sends a trap, WiFi
Manager will receive it and alert the operator
- Severity based color-coded alarms: WiFi Manager assigns
severity to every network failure and generates color-coded
alarms
- Email-based notification: WiFi Manager notifies operators
through email when a fault occurs
- Threshold monitoring: WiFi Manager allows you to set threshold
values for key parameters and alerts you when the actual
values exceed the set threshold levels.
- Service monitoring: WiFi Manager monitors the services
running in your Access Points such as the web service.
- Performance monitoring: WiFi Manager monitors the WLAN
devices for various parameters such as Tx/Rx traffic and
utilization, datarate, channel usage, errors etc.
In addition to monitoring the WLAN devices for various parameters,
WiFi Manager also provides the flexibility of accessing that
information in various formats. For ease of use the default
format that WiFi Manager uses is PDF. You can configure WiFi
Manager to send specific reports to your email id too. And
for periodic assessment you can even configure WiFi Manager
to send reports at a specified time periodically. Ex: Daily
morning 10AM - Send Utilization report to - wlanmanagement@youraddress.com.
WLAN Management Function 3: Configuring the WLAN devices
Today, every access point in the market comes with in-built
Web application that enables configuration from any Web browser.
But as the WLAN grows in size the number of access points
increases resulting in more UIs to look at. Hence the biggest
value that a WLAN management software can give is BULK
configuration of access points. Operators should be able to
group accesspoints and apply configurations at one click.
WiFi Manager addresses this problem in two ways. First it
supports group based configuration. Second it supports template-based
configuration. Operators can pick a template, fill in the
relevant values, and then apply the template to select access
points.
Configuring the devices for basic settings, radio settings,
security settings, access control list settings etc., is just
one aspect of configuration. The other is firmware upgrade.
WLAN Management software should also enable you to upgrade
the access point firmware with as much as ease as configuring
the SSID or channel settings. WiFi Manager follows the same
template based model for firmware upgrade too. You can import
a firmware image into the system, select the access points
to which the firmware has to be applied, and then click apply.
As simple as that. You can also group access points and upgrade
the firmware for the entire group at one click.
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