Deploying a multipoint wireless radio network is a significant investment in both time and capital for any organization. Maximizing your results requires some forward planning – here are our top pieces of advice.
Expert Network Design
There really is no substitute for proper RF engineering when it comes to a multipoint deployment. For best success you need experts to carry out robust propagation modelling, coverage engineering and site planning to ensure you meet your coverage requirements. A good RF network designer will also be looking at self and co-channel interference which can be a real challenge in certain environments. Methods such as leaving spare channels for multiple frequency re-use can become your most useful tool at your network boundary to ensure interference doesn’t impact your performance.
Interference Tolerance
While on the topic of interference, in addition to smart network design, your next focus with a multipoint deployment should be on ensuring the radios you use are highly tolerant to interference. This is particularly important at ‘noisy’ sites, such as those where radios will be co-located with cellular services. In a busy radio environment, features such as bandpass filters to clean noise and a wide dynamic range can go a long way to minimizing interference.
Looking to the future, as more radios get installed adjacent to your original installations, you can expect to be facing greater noise that could create an interruption of service in your mission-critical operations. Therefore, the investment at the outset in radios capable of co-existing with other equipment is an important consideration.
Bandwidth
Data capacity is generally right at the top of the list when searching for a radio vendor. A great first step is to work out your capacity requirements now and into the future – check out our article here on How to plan your network capacity for a guide.
However, bandwidth is not just about bit rates per second. Innovation around compression, the use of high order modulation, MIMO vs SISO and full duplex vs half duplex will all have an impact on your data throughput.
QoS
Often our customers have mission critical information which must be granted priority during transmission. In a bandwidth-constrained environment, it is absolutely essential that bandwidth is not being used to transmit non-essential data when equipment in the network could be in an alarm state. To avoid this scenario, you must either invest in a switch to mark the IP traffic or purchase radios with the ability to set the Quality of Service (QoS) via configurable filters or rules.
Latency
And finally, you need to consider latency rates across your multipoint network as high latency could massively impact the transmission of mission critical data. In simple terms, the quicker you can be aware of issues in outlying areas of your network, the better the outcomes for your organization.
Standard industry recommendations are generally to have latency sitting below 100ms. However, by combining radio equipment designed to offer low latency with a network which has been designed by an RF expert, you can bring those rates down to lower than 30ms.