Coverage Improvement of IEEE 802.11n Based Campus Wide Wireless LANs

Wi-Fi is the most commonly used technology for internet access. Many commercial organizations and educational complexes have been using IEEE 802.11n based wireless Local Area Networks in their campuses to provide seamless internet access to their stake holders. However, these networks suffer severe network coverage problems due to which, some of the network users in the campus will not be in the coverage of the network and some will go out of coverage when they are moving from one building to another in the campus, which causes the loss of some of the important and critical information. These no Wi-Fi coverage areas are known as Dead Zones. In this paper, the authors have made an attempt to identify dead zones in the campus by measuring Wi-Fi signal strength using Netspot tool. The Wi-Fi signal strength is represented with heat map to identify the weak signal areas and dead zones. Solutions to improve the coverage have been presented.