Impact of Client Performance
When designing and deploying and verifying wireless networks, we often focus only on the capabilities of
offered wireless network on APs’ side and ignore the very important element of the wireless network - the
wireless client.
Therefore, we must consider the capabilities and device behavior of target Wi-Fi clients when designing
and deploying and verifying wireless networks.
The main differences in client capabilities (example):
• Does the client use a built-in network card or USB?
• Does the client support 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual bands?
• Which of 5 GHz channels does the client support?
• Client transmission power.
• Client receiving sensitivity.
• Does it support 40MHz, 80MHz channel width?
• The number of antennas for sending and receiving on client, and the number of supported spatial
streams.
• Client antenna gain, antenna installation position.
• The number of the client can scan.
• Client support for air interface encryption?
The main differences in client behavior (example):
• Algorithm to select AP on initial connection?
• Roaming decision algorithm?
Among all these, the most related factors that need to be consider during Wi-Fi deployment planning is
client's transmission power.
Considering limited battery life of mobile device, the wireless client's transmission power is usually set to
low. In addition, the size of the wireless client is very small, which limits the space for antenna very much.
As a result, the antenna gain of many clients is 0, and the transmission power is very small, which is as
shown below:
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