Computer Engineering and Information Systems

Computer Engineering and Information Systems Case Study

Memo to Construction Company to Upgrade their High Speed LAN

Colin Tangeman

Choosing Between Wireless and Wired LAN Configurations

As your construction business continues to expand, your network traffic on the Local Area Network (LAN) you are running on is continuing to grow exponentially. You will need to expand your High Seed LAN using either of two options, each which has specific technology-based strengths and weaknesses associated with each. Your two options are a wireless LAN or wired LANs. You may have hard about wireless LANs or Wi-Fi, which is a technology that encodes your information into a radio wave, much the same used for sending music and new information to car stereos across broad distances. The greater the frequency of the radio wave, the more data it can carry from a broadcasting device to a receiver or router, which is what many laptops, tablet PCs and smartphones have in them today (Varshney, Vetter, 2000). Just like the units of measure in your construction business, radio waves that are the foundation of Wi-Fi communication have a very clear set of standards and also linearly scale in KHz levels. Think of the kHz as power measures in your business; they are similar. For example if you are building a new production plant and are wiring it for 220V, there will be much greater breadth of power for devices using that outlet. A 10 kHz wireless router will do the same; it will take 10 times the amount of data than its 1 kHz counterpart. And just as 220V lines are often designed for a very specific production purpose, the kHz ranges of wireless or Wi-Fi networks can do the same. Think of a Wi-Fi LAN technology as a very customized radio you can tune to deliver songs either as quickly or as slowly as you'd like, and at whatever level of sound fidelity you choose as well. For the 10 kHz Wi-Fi networks the songs would be arriving at your car or portable radio at 10 times that of a 1 kHz radio. To understanding how modulation works in a Wi-Fi network. Consider if you can encode up to four segments of a song in a single wave; this is comparable to how modulating methods work.

And just like each type of radio-controlled device, from a hi-fi stereo to a radio-frequency (RF) controlled plane respond to entirely different frequencies, the same holds true with the different standards and frequencies for Wi-Fi networks as well. And just like RF-controlled planes, a change in the characteristics of the wave being sent the flying plane the greater the change in direction, speed, and altitude. it's the same with a Wi-Fi network, where the higher the frequency and the more data is communicated via the wave, the more the actual performance of the RF plane changes. And just like an RF plane that can take in very high frequencies of waves while others will bounce off the device or begin to have properties like light waves (meaning they refract and reverberate) the same holds true for Wi-Fi signals.

If you have ever flown an RF plane you can relate to this allegory and its implications on the distance a plane can travel, navigated by the signal from the control unit and the strength of the signal waves. The same is true of a Wi-Fi network. The stronger the frequency of a LAN as measured in kHz, the farther a signal can travel and the larger the potential LAN can be. And just as a signal being sent to an RF plane will dissipate over time, the same holds true for a Wi-Fi network. This property of a network signal losing speed is called attenuation. Many times companies such as yours will use repeaters or a device that allows the Wi-Fi signal to be strengthened and sent forward to other parts of the network. In addition to attenuation there is also the aspect of physical limitations of a network as well. In wireless networks, these physical limitations are defined more by the electrical power of the device. In wired networks it is the length of the cable and distance between repeaters or those devices that re-amplify and strengthen the signal.