Feature Spotlight: Generating an Automatic Design Plan in iBwave Wi-Fi

In this week’s Feature Spotlight blog I look at how to generate an automatic Design Plan with iBwave Wi-Fi.

Why is this feature such a useful one?

A few different reasons but ultimately, this feature does three things:

1) Gives you a single place to view and update your entire network design

2) Eliminates the need to do this manually in Visio or Excel

3) Eliminates the risk of human error when creating it manually

In this blog, I’ll cover:

What is the Design Plan
How is it Generated?
What Can You Do With It?
What’s the Value?

What is the Design Plan?

In iBwave Wi-Fi the design plan is the overall design of your network, essentially combining all of your floor plans to show the overall layout of all the components included in your design and how they work together. This could include Access Points, Cable Routing, Switches, Routers – whatever components you have included in your design.

An example of a Design Plan for three story hotel looks like this ?

How is the Design Plan Created?

The Design Plan is created/managed from the ‘Plan Organizer’ icon on the ‘Design Plan’ tab, located before all of your floor plans in the design. Once you go into the ‘Plan Organizer’ you can determine how many floors are in the design plan, assign with Layout Plan correlates to which floor, and select the color/text options for display.

Here is what setting up a Design Plan looks like ?

Once you have the Design Plan setup, anytime a component such as an Access Point, Cable Route, Switch, Router, etc is added or updated, the Design Plan will automatically generate and reflect the changes done in the Layout Plan tabs, on the Design Plan.

Here’s a quick look at it in action where I add a new AP to the floor plan, route the cable, and see the update immediately refelected in the Design Plan ?

What Can You Do With the Design Plan?

Besides giving you an overview of your entire network design, the Design Plan is a great place to perform mass updates to your design or component properties. Here are a few different useful things you can do with it.

Mass Update Network Components (APs, routers, etc)

From the Design Plan, you can change out network components for other network components all at one time. Just right -click on a component and then select ‘Update All Components Like This One’ – from there you simply select what component you want to update it with and voila, everything is updated.

Mass Update Cost for Network Design Components

In iBwave Wi-Fi there is a cost details report that lists all of your network components and associated costs – to get that report accurate a cost needs to be assigned to each component. To assign costs to components in bulk, you can right-click one component, select all the similar components, enter a cost, and then apply it to all.

Export to Image for Documentation

The Design Plan can also be handy for the installation team to give them an overall visual of the plan – accompanied with the equipment list, cross reference and cabling reports, it can help to ensure an accurate installation.

What’s the Value?

For one large OEM who recently switched to iBwave Wi-Fi, the automatic design plan feature alone saved them 7 hours of work on an average size project compared to a competitor product, as it eliminated the need for them to manually create the plan in Visio or Excel. It also eliminated any natural human errors that may have occured as a result of doing it manually (and any troubleshooting that resulted).

Have any questions about this feature or have a request to cover a specific feature or process? Let me know in the comments below.

R9 Sneak Peek: 3D Antenna Patterns #ComingSoon

One of the most recognizable features of any iBwave network design software is the 3D modeling capabilities within it. And while the 3D aspect of the software looks great and helps many of our customers to impress their own customers in the bid process, the 3D modeling capabilities are about much more than just looking impressive. It’s part of our dedication to providing our customers with the best software to accurately predict network performance.

Which is why in our upcoming release of iBwave Design 9, we’ve taken our 3D capabilities to yet another level with 3D antenna pattern modeling.

Why is the impact of this new feature and why does it matter?

Simply put, 3D antenna patterns will allow users to model antenna coverage more precisely and accurately – especially when it comes to large directional stadium antennas. This is because the large directional antennas have very precise beams that ensure separation between sectors – which is very important due to the interference which can occur between sectors that can degrade the signal quality of the antenna.

So when such an antenna is modeled using a 2D antenna pattern, the software will simply interpolate the 3D pattern using the 2 slices of the 2D pattern. By doing this, most of the time the side lobes are not well modeled which in the end can impact the prediction accuracy in some regions of the coverage area. In many cases, this can lead to the antenna showing good results during prediction – when in reality there is more interference than showing, and the network will not perform as well as predicted.

With the introduction of 3D antenna patterns coming out in our next release, each antenna will be perfectly modeled in all directions based on lab measurements and manufacturer specifications. As a result, the prediction results in iBwave Design for designs using these large directional antennas will be even more accurate than previously – especially on the sides of the antenna where side lobes will degrade quality.

Here is an example of a 3D antenna pattern in the upcoming iBwave Design 9 – note the 3D side lobes.

And while the 3D antenna pattern modeling will be available for all antennas, typically for omni antennas such as the one below, our interpolation from a 2D pattern will be very close to what you would get with a 3D pattern – so because it is already so accurate, 3D patterns for such antennas will not be necessary.

Exciting news, right? We think so! Watch for this new feature in iBwave Design coming out at the end of September.

Do you currently use iBwave Design for stadium designs? Will you find this new feature useful once it’s launched?

Wirelessly yours, in 3D,

Kelly

3 Features that Increase Prediction Accuracy

There are many things that can throw off the results of a network’s performance prediction during the design phase of a wireless network deployment. Anything from setting the scale a little bit incorrectly, to using the wrong wall material type, to not knowing what is behind the venue’s walls that may impact signal loss, to using flat surfaces where there are incline surfaces – and the list goes on and on. Needless to say, accurately predicting the performance of a network before it goes live, can be hard to do because so many different factors impact it.

Which is why in iBwave software—both iBwave Wi-Fi and iBwave Design—we try to empower users with many capabilities to ensure that the prediction done in the design phase will be as accurately reflect the performance once it goes live, as accurately as possible.

Here are 3 ways to ensure more accurate prediction results using iBwave software.

The Materials Database and Editor

The out-of-box materials database in iBwave Wi-Fi and iBwave Design is extensive (give or take about 85 different defined materials). But we know that all the materials in the default database are the only ones that may be needed during the design of a network. It is often the case that our customers need to add custom materials with differing signal loss configurations to ensure the most accurate representation of the venue they are modeling. So for this reason, we’ve made adding new materials to the database easy for our customers to do themselves. The materials database (and the components database) is fully editable for our customers to add their own materials and allows them enter information such as: transmission loss per band, conductivity per band, a material image (viewable in 3D) and then design properties such as trace color, texture width, height, etc.

Here is an example of one of my favorite materials: Water at 20^oC

**Water Material: Signal Loss by Band (2.4GHz shown)**

To read more about how to edit the components database, check out this blog.

Prediction Calibration

Unique to iBwave when it comes to network design software is the ability to calibrate prediction results with a live reading from the venue. So for example, when designing a Wi-Fi network and you have done an active or passive survey on the site, you can then use the measurement readings to calibrate the prediction. Because while you may have the right wall material selected in the model, you never know what is behind the wall that could impact the signal strength – metal beams, wood, etc. Using a live reading from the site to calibrate gets you that much closer to prediction accuracy. In iBwave Wi-Fi and iBwave Design there is also a ‘Prediction versus Measured Data’ report that can statistically show you the results of prediction versus the live measurement.

Here is a screenshot of prediction calibration, as well as the ‘Prediction versus Measured Data Report’. In these two reports you will see that the mean error, absolute mean error, and the standard deviation prior to calibration are all significantly higher than after we ran calibration using the passive survey measurements.

**Prediction Versus Measured Data Report (No Calibration)**

**Prediction Versus Measured Data Report (With Calibration)**

Incline Surfaces

I covered this topic fairly thoroughly in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, but it’s an important factor when it comes to prediction accuracy so I am also including it here. The ability to accurately model incline surfaces for venues which have inclined surfaces (I’m thinking stadiums, shopping malls, airports, subway tunnels, etc) can be invaluable for ensuring the network prediction during the design phase is a realistic representation of how the network will perform post-installation. In the one case study I did using a subway station/tunnel as an example, the difference between using incline surfaces during modeling and not can lead to a prediction difference of about 35dBm – which in reality translated to the users of the network having good signal strength, or none at all.

Here are the screenshots from the subway station example.

**Flat Model with No Incline Surfaces (showing a good signal strength)**

**With Incline Surfaces (showing in reality how the network will perform poorly)**

What are some other factors you have noticed have a large impact on accurate prediction results?

Wirelessly yours,

Kelly