User's Manual

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For a warehouse application, for example, you should design the wireless cells larger and

tolerate a higher level of interference. This increases reliability, since the second nearest

access point to a given location will probably be usable in case the nearest one fails. To

change the size of the wireless cells, click the Access Points tab and adjust the transmit-

ter power of each access point. The higher the transmitter power of an access point, the

larger the cell it covers.

Inversely, if you are designing a network for voice-over-WLAN, you should plan smaller

cells. This is because interference should be minimized for voice-over-WLAN, since voice

packets that are lost due to interference are not resent, as lost packets in other applica-

tions are. Thus interference affects voice ﬁdelity, and in extreme cases can make voice

communication impossible.

4.2 Entering Environmental Factors

In planning a wireless network with the RF3D WiﬁPlanner, you should follow a certain se-

quence of steps in order to achieve your objective quickly and easily. Furthermore, perform-

ing the steps in the order described here minimizes the computation involved, and hence

the processing time as well. The process can be divided into ve simple steps:

Once you have imported all the building plans as described in Section 3.1, you should ﬁrst

draw in the ﬂoors in each level. If all the ﬂoors in the building are of the same shape and the

same materials, you can copy the ﬁrst ﬂoor to all the other plans using the menu command

Edit/Paste Floor to Other Levels.

Hint: Before you begin drawing in all the building elements, you can turn off the Automatic

selective recompute function as described in Section 3.4. This will save processor time, since

otherwise the RF3D WiﬁPlanner recomputes the wireless network characteristics each time

you draw an element of the building plan.

There are two different kinds of walls in the RF3D WiPlanner: supporting walls, drawn with the

Supp. Wall tool in the Toolbox, and partition walls, drawn with the Wall tool. When you draw a

supporting wall, it is automatically inserted in all levels of the building, and the RF3D WiﬁPlan-

ner treats it as a single element. You should use supporting walls to represent all the walls in

your building that have the same position and material composition in all levels. This can sig-

niﬁcantly reduce the processing time in comparison to normal walls drawn in on each level

separately, since there are fewer elements to be processed by the computing algorithms.

After you have drawn in all the supporting walls, you should draw in the partition walls on

each level.