User's Guide

1 7signal sapphire – WQA Solution 1
7signal Ltd, Panuntie 6, FI-00620 HELSINKI, FINLAND, [phone], [e-mail], www.7signal.com
7signal Sapphire Carat Carat User Guide Release 3.0
1 7signal sapphire – WQA Solution
Welcome to 7signal Sapphire, providing you with a new way to continuously and automatically
measure the health and quality of a wireless network from the user's perspective. A commonly
used term here is wireless quality assurance, or WQA. Companies and their business processes
are becoming increasingly dependent on the performance and service quality of their wireless
networks. Thanks to the Sapphire WQA solution, companies can integrate the quality
management of wireless networks with their existing IT and communications technology
services.
7signal Sapphire uses monitoring stations (Sapphire Eye) to monitor performance and quality
in WLAN cells and to monitor the surrounding radio frequency environment. The performance
of the customer’s network is tested against a test server (Sonar). Interactive tests, monitoring
stations, and parameters for automatic measurement are managed with a centralized
management tool (Sapphire Carat). The measurement results are reported via a business
application (Sapphire Loupe). Both tools can forward results either automatically or manually
to designated persons in the company, or to third parties, such as technical support or other
service provider.
The monitoring station, Sapphire Eye, continuously monitors the selected WLAN channels via
passive listening, which does not have an impact on network performance. It can also
impersonate a client device in the target network and then use the network and the services
provided through it. By comparing measurement results to a previously saved acceptable
environment, the solution can detect interfering transmitters, access points and clients
behaving in undesirable ways, and other applications using unregulated frequency bands that
can potentially affect network functionality. Among these applications might be motion
detectors, microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, powerful electric motors, radiation devices
used for decontamination, and baby monitors. The solution can also produce proactive
statistics on the predicted user experience of network performance, which enables the
company to increase network capacity before the users notice loss of performance.
In user emulation tests, also known as active tests, Eye connects to the test server (Sonar) over
the wireless network and uses it like an ordinary production service. The use may include mass
file transfers, browser downloads, wireless VoIP calls, or connections to another production
server. Simply put, Sapphire tests the end-user experience by examining the entire data chain
from the client to the production service. Active tests can monitor the network even when
there are no users in the network. This makes it possible to forecast performance problems
and to take corrective actions even before the service level suffers. Active tests show the
availability and quality of services offered over the network, and they help administrators to
see why some applications with their various demands for network performance do not work
as expected in the network or some of its areas. When problems occur, active tests can also
aid in location of the problem area in the network topology, which often includes WLAN, LAN,
and WAN elements.
The key benefits of 7signal Sapphire are user emulation, superb coverage, continuous
monitoring, and visibility of network health. Competing solutions are often based on
monitoring the access point settings. As a result, they do not give any indication of the service
quality experienced by the end user. In such limited solutions, the service quality parameters
measured are the same as in wired networks. Sapphire, by contrast, produces a
comprehensive picture of the radio connection quality, where delay, number of
retransmissions, and packet loss are taken into account, in addition to the commonly
measured parameters.