As part of your wireless deployment planning, you must take capacity and airtime demand into consideration and not just coverage planning. The airtime demand peak amount and type of traffic must be factored in to your plan to understand traffic patterns for your wireless network and the coverage area it serves.
For example, a deployment for a hotel and its conference rooms will have very different capacity and airtime demand criteria than a general small office deployment, a retail department store, or a school. Each wireless deployment is unique and requires both coverage and capacity planning.
Capacity and airtime demand analysis provides:
- Optimal number of clients per access point radio, including idle and active
- You must factor in slow periods and worse-case scenarios for usage
- Airtime demand and minimum data rates for different types of application traffic
- Include email, web, video, social media, streaming, and other applications.
- Determine bandwidth throughout per application and connection, then determine aggregate bandwidth required in the wireless network coverage area.
- Considerations for growth
- Based on number of connected clients and application bandwidth usage
WatchGuard AP Deployment Overview