PLANNING AVAILABLE WLAN IN DYNAMIC PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS

What is still missing in the convergence of IT and automation technologies is the integration of wireless communication. In this paper we consider the problem of planning available Wireless LAN (WLAN) in production environments with dynamic radio-propagation properties. Our approach is an autonomic control loop with feedback simulation and optimization. We present in detail the simulation and calibration module which automatically keeps the knowledge about the current radio coverage up-to-date. Evaluation showed that the constrained least squares calibration method results in a more accurate model compared to other methods. The results are general to planning WLAN availability in production environments. Copyright © 2007 IFAC