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Cisco 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance
Deployment Guide
This document provides configuration and deployment guidelines as well as troubleshooting tips and
answers to frequently asked technical questions for those adding the Cisco 2700 Series Wireless
Location Appliance (hereafter referred to as the location appliance) (Figure 1) to a Cisco wireless LAN
network. The existing installation and configuration guides for this appliance are available at the
following location:
http://www.ci
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lightweight access points. This appliance tracks any Wi-Fi device, including Wi-Fi clients, standards-based Wi-Fi active RFID tags, rogue access points, and clients. It was designed with the following requirements in mind: • Manageability—The same browser-based interface that is used for the Cisco WCS is also used for the appliance. Moreover, the location appliance integrates directly into the wireless LAN architecture, providing one unified network to manage instead of multiple disparate
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Calibration is the process whereby sample signal strength measurements are physically taken in the actual environments in which you wish to perform location tracking as inputs to tune the location tracking rather than using the canned or simulated environment’s inputs. Calibration is performed on a per-floor basis with a wireless laptop using RSSI measurements. The goal of the calibration process is to refine location accuracy to be within the specifications (10 m, 90%). The calibration is
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The following Cisco wireless LAN controllers are available. Table 2 Controllers Part Number Description AIR-WL C2006-K9 Cisco 2000 series wireless LAN controller for up to six Cisco Aironet 1000 series lightweight access points AIR-WL C4402-12-K9 4400 series WLAN controller for up to 12 Cisco Aironet 1000 series access points AIR-WL C4402-25-K9 4400 series WLAN controller for up to 25 Cisco Aironet 1000 series access points AIR-WL C4402-50-K9 4400 series WLAN controller for up to 50 Cisco
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Figure 2 Location Determination Note To add the location appliance, the WCS version with location must be installed. You cannot add the location appliance to the WCS base version. Additional Functionality with Location Appliance Figure 3 illustrates the scale and variety of classes of devices that can be tracked by the location appliance. You can narrow the search parameters if you are interested only in a subset of devices. For example, a biomedical user may want to see only infusion pumps a
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System Architecture Figure 3 Scale and Variety of Devices System Architecture The location appliance integrates with Cisco's centralized wireless LAN architecture. The appliance sits out of the data path of the wireless LAN, working with both the WCS and the controllers to track device locations (see Figure 4). Cisco 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance Deployment Guide 6 OL-8478-01
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Location-Based Services Overview Figure 4 System Architecture Access points can detect devices both on the channels where they service clients and on all other channels by periodically scanning, while still providing uninterrupted data access to their wireless clients. The gathered raw location data is then forwarded from each access point upstream to its controller. The location appliance polls controllers via SNMP for this raw location information. To understand this gathered device inf
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Deployment and Design Requirements Rogue clients are simply all client devices that are associated to rogue access points. Asset tags are any vendors' 802.11-based RF ID tags within range of infrastructure access points. Deployment and Design Requirements Consider the type of devices involved and how many devices will be tracked. Tracking of any of the four device types can be configured. Determine the total number of devices and plan to deploy one location appliance for every 1500 simultane
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Deployment and Design Requirements AIR-ANT-5145V-R AIR-ANT-5160V-R Access Point Placement To determine the optimum location of all devices in the wireless LAN coverage areas, you need to consider the access point density and location. Ensure that no fewer than 3 access points, and preferably 4 or 5, provide coverage to every area where device location is required. The more access points that detect a device, the better. This high level guideline translates into the following best practi
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Deployment and Design Requirements Figure 6 Improved Location Accuracy by Increasing Density 3. In long and narrow coverage areas, refrain from placing access points in a straight line. Instead, attempt to stagger them such that each access point is more likely to provide a more unique snapshot of device location (see Figure 7). Figure 7 Refrain From Straight Line Placement Though the design in Figure 7 may provide enough access point density for high bandwidth applications, location suffer
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Deployment and Design Requirements Figure 8 Improved Location Accuracy by Staggering Around Perimeter 5. Designing a location-aware wireless LAN, while planning for voice as well, is better done with a few things in mind. Most current wireless handsets support only 802.11b, which only offers three non-overlapping channels. Therefore, wireless LANs designed for telephony tend to be less dense than those planned to carry data. Also, when traffic is queued in the Platinum QoS bucket (typically
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Deployment and Design Requirements the buildings that comprise that campus, and the floors of each building constitute a single network design. The location appliance is set to poll the controllers in that network, as well as be configured to synchronize with that specific network design, in order to track devices in that environment. The concept and steps to perform synchronization between WCS and the location appliance is explained in “Importing the Location Appliance into WCS, page 20.”
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Deployment and Design Requirements Step 6 Check to enable the Maintain Aspect Ratio check box. Enabling this check box causes the horizontal span of the campus to be 5000 feet and adjusts the vertical span according to the image file’s aspect ratio. Adjusting either the horizontal or vertical span changes the other field in accordance with the image ratio. You should uncheck the Maintain Aspect Ratio check box if you want to override this automatic adjustment. You could then adjust both s
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Deployment and Design Requirements Figure 12 Repositioning Building Highlighted in Blue Step 12 WCS is then returned to the campus image with the newly created building highlighted in a green box.Click the green box (see Figure 13). Figure 13 Newly Created Building Highlighted in Green Step 13 To create a building without a campus, choose New Building and click Go. Cisco 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance Deployment Guide 14 OL-8478-01
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Deployment and Design Requirements Step 14 Enter the building’s name, contact information, number of floors and basements, and dimension information. Click OK. WCS is returned to the Monitor > Maps window. Step 15 Click the hyperlink associated with the newly created building. Step 16 On the Monitor > Maps > [Campus Name] > [Building Name] window, go to the drop-down menu and choose New Floor Area. Click Go. Step 17 Input a name for the floor, a contact, a floor number, floor type, and heigh
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Deployment and Design Requirements Step 21 At the new floor’s image window (Monitor > Maps > [CampusName] > [BuildingName] > [FloorName]), go to the drop-down menu on the upper right and choose Add Access Points. Click Go. Step 22 All access points that are connected to controllers, which WCS is configured to manage and which have yet to be added to another floor map, are displayed. Select which access points need to be placed on the specific floor map by checking the boxes to the left of t
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Deployment and Design Requirements Creating and Applying Calibration Models If the provided RF models do not sufficiently characterize the floor layout, you can create a calibration model that is applied to the floor and better represents the attenuation characteristics of that floor. In environments where many floors share common attenuation characteristics (such as in a library), one calibration model can be created and then applied to all similar floors. Use a laptop or other wireless de
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Deployment and Design Requirements Step 7 When the chosen floor map and access point locations are presented, a grid of dots indicates the locations where data collection for calibration is performed. Using these locations as guidelines, position a wireless device in a known location on the floor. Click on the map to position the red crosshairs, indicate where the device should be located, and click Save (see Figure 17). Figure 17 Positioning the Crosshairs Note Use a client device that sup
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Configuring the Location Appliance Step 10 When all the raw data collection has been performed, the model must be compiled to allow WCS and the location appliance to use the data for the understanding of RF attenuation characteristics. To compute the collected data points, choose Calibrate from the drop-down menu and click Go. Step 11 To use the newly created calibration model, you must apply the model to the floor on which it was created (and on any other floors with similar attenuation ch
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Configuring the Location Appliance #service network restart 5. Verify that the new IP addressing works properly and that the location appliance has connectivity back to the WCS by pinging the WCS’ IP address. #ping [IP_Address] If IP connectivity is verified between the location appliance and WCS, the location appliance is ready to be imported into WCS. Importing the Location Appliance into WCS To import a location appliance into WCS, follow the steps below. 1. Navigate to Locate > Location
