WLAN Troubleshooting
David D Coleman, David A Westcott · 2018
This chapter discusses many of the freeware and commercial WLAN troubleshooting tools that are available. The diagnostic approach that is used to troubleshoot wired 802.3 networks should also be applied when troubleshooting a wireless local area network (WLAN). A bottom-up approach to analyzing the OSI reference model layers also applies to wireless networking. Proper capacity and coverage planning, spectrum analysis, and a validation site survey will eliminate the majority of WLAN support tickets in regard to performance. Proper WLAN design will minimize problems such as co-channel interference (CCI) in advance. WLAN coverage holes are usually a result of a lack of a site survey validation. Radio frequency (RF) interference from non-802.11 transmitters is by far the most common external cause of WLAN problems that exist at layer 1. The energy detect (ED) thresholds for non-802.11 transmissions are much higher than the signal detect (SD) thresholds for detecting 802.11 radio transmissions.