Motorola AirDefense - Network Assurance Solutions

LIVERF: Remote Real-Time Visualization of the Wireless Network

Ensure WLAN Coverage and Reliability
Continuous monitoring is necessary after deploying a wireless network to ensure network availability and performance. Motorola AirDefense LiveRF is a unique application that provides network visualization of real-time and historic events. These visualizations provide streamlined troubleshooting for issues such as transient sources of interference, changing usage patterns and physical changes in the the environment.

LiveRF collects and analyzes data gathered from the deployed network to create visualizations of the RF signal propagation, noise and interference location, and application coverage. LiveRF visualizations are based on network configuration settings and performance statistics collected directly from WLAN infrastructure. With access to both real-time and historical visualizations, you will be able to quickly view and understand wireless trends and problems for faster remediation. Monitoring and visualizations help IT staff LiveRFimprove network reliability by allowing resolution of coverage problems before users are negatively impacted.

Keep Critical Applications Running with Network Analysis
The LiveRF module also performs sophisticated RF propagation analysis, taking into account the RF characteristics of your 3D environment, including objects such as walls, floors and ceilings. By comparing real-time coverage to expected coverage, you can anticipate loss of application performance in your wireless environment. Monitoring can include predefined wireless applications such as VoWLAN, mobile computing devices or basic Wi-Fi connectivity. You can customize nine different parameters to monitor your environment for the requirements of your unique applications. This proactive monitoring helps you detect reduced network coverage faster, so issues can be resolved before an end user reports a problem.

Analyze & Compare Data
LiveRF provides several types of side-by-side comparative analysis to help you address challenges in your wireless network. Real-time visualizations of your RF environment lets you view current coverage information, providing a much simpler way to analyze the network issues and understand the impact changes have on your network. With LiveRF, you can compare a current live view of WLAN activity with a known healthy environment or with historical views. This simplifies problem identification and makes it easier for your IT staff to troubleshoot and fix coverage-related issues. It is also important to be able to recognize what is normal for your particular environment.

Wireless problems are often transient in nature, meaning that the issue impacting an end user just a few minutes ago may no longer be visible to support staff. With LiveRF, historical visualizations enable you to view the environment as it looked a day, a month or even a year ago and compare it to another historical view or current live network data. This historical view lets you see the reoccurrence and frequency of transient network problems and the impact on your WLAN environment.

Intelligently Plan Network Expansion
WLAN network design and planning functionality is also a key part of the LiveRF toolset. This powerful tool not only models signal strength, data rate and interference but also visualizes the site-specific MIMO effects of the deployment environment for 802.11n access points. The planning function of LiveRF allows creation of RF intelligent floor plans from scratch or from imported floor plan models. You can recommend access point locations and settings based on the number of users, their locations and the applications they will use within the RF-intelligent model. You can predict how a planned network will perform for web surfing, file downloads, FTP file transfers, video conferencing, wireless VoIP or location-based triangulation with specialized application coverage maps. The software also allows users to “manually” place APs in the model with real-time predictions.

FEATURES

• Historic application-specific analysis
• Side-by-side comparative analysis
• Option to rewind time and visualize network coverage in the past
• Support for long-term trend analysis
• Configurable time scale supports user-defined time intervals for analysis

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