Wireless Site Survey Paper

694 Words3 Pages

The School of Administration at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has hired and requested a network service to do a wireless site survey of the building of Founders Hall. The purpose of this survey is to conduct the building’s wireless environment, determining all the access points, including the location of the scan and other details of the access points. The building has four floors total, starting from the basement to the 3rd floor. The objective of this assignment is to use a Wi-Fi inspector to gather these lists of information:
• SSID
• Protocol
• Encryption
• Authentication
• MAC
• Channel
• Any comments related
After running initial test and analysis using the Wi-Fi inspector, Founders Hall is established to have a decent connection …show more content…

The results are based on a one trial test run that I did start from the basement of the building through the 3rd floor. These results are gathered by doing the run test from one side of the floor to the end, marked with the room number. Since the test was not done thoroughly room to room, there may be more access points that were not listed on the results above. In order to be more accurate on every access point in the building, doing one test trial is not enough rather doing more test will result to better and more accurate access …show more content…

As far as the Wi-Fi diagnostic tools, I used the “Wireless Diagnostics” provided by the Macintosh laptop. Refer to Figure A, the screen shows that there are 39 total due to scanning only the 3rd floor on this result. The Wi-Fi diagnostic tool can break scans for each floor, providing a total number of scans on four floors. Figure B, shows a graph of signal, quality and rate. With a little research, signal aka RSSI is a “usable strength of the radio waves, expressed in decibels between 0db (strongest) and -120(weakest). Smaller negative numbers represent a cleaner/stronger signal. For wireless data communications, normal range is -45db to -87db. Anything below -85db is generally unusable, and over -50db can be considered perfect” (How to read RSSI/signal and SNR/noise ratings ?). Noises in the other hand are a wireless communication that is a combination of all unwanted interfering signal sources. The value is measured from 0 to -120 db. The closer a value is to -120 the better since there is less interference and typical environments range between -110db and -80db (How to read RSSI/signal and SNR/noise ratings