General Notes and Requirements

The WLAN Visual Assistant is a tool for analyzing WLAN-networks, especially designed for buildings. It consists of two programs, the WLAN-Visualizer for a Windows-PC, the second one, the MobileWLANAssistant, for a PDA. The program's basic idea is the following: in a building with a number of floors a WLAN-network is to be build or is already installed. An administrator can now load existing maps of the floors into the main program and mark different points where he intends to measure the quality of the network. After the transfer of this data onto the PDA the administrator will now go to those measuring points and will actually measure the quality of the WLAN-network. after the measuring, the data is transferred back to the PC. Here an interpolation can now visualize the measured data. Based upon this visualization, the administrator can now make decisions about application and the position of WLAN-access-points. The up to now only briefly described procedures will be explained quite in detail in this handbook.

We start with the requirements in hardware and software which are needed for the program:

• PC:
  • Windows with .NET-framework, at least version 1.1
  • Bluetooth-connection and correctly installed drivers

• PDA:
  • PocketPC 2002 operating system
  • Bluetooth

• Misc:
  • Maps of the different floors of the building, needed in JPEG or BMP format. The best resolution during test was 700 x 560. If you have very big images, you should first test the functionality of the program with them before you create larger measuring projects.
  • Information about the position of WLAN access points

The logical structure of the program data is quite easy: The almighty basic module is the whole building, consisting of some floors, one upon the other. The WLAN-Visualizer expects all the maps of the floors to be in the same scale, and if two points in different maps have the same coordinates, they should lay in top of each other in the real world, too. The floor plan should be black on white background. Each floor itself contains some measuring points, who contain the measured quality values and other properties.