Wireless LAN management in the enterprise: Requirements, gaps in state of the art, and proposals for solutions

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs also known as WiFi Networks or WLANs are becoming increasingly popular in enterprise networks. The physical layer and other link layer protocol issues have been resolved well enough now to enable the technology to have a sustained growth. As with any networking technology, the technology is created first and the management solutions come later. WLAN has been no different. Over the years, a lot of academic and commercial research has been poured into WLANs to improve the understanding of interference, noise, protocols, data rates etc. However, very little comprehensive research has been done on how to manage a functioning WLAN. This was probably because WLANs were not reliable until recently that prevented them from being used by a large population and hence no one bothered about managing them. Additionally, commercial vendors promoting their tools for WLAN management have been focusing mainly on physical layer issues involved in running the WLANs and not on a comprehensive WLAN management solution. Now that WLANs are mostly reliable, there is a need to understand all the requirements around managing WLANs as well as to understand the gaps in state of the art management solutions that need to be addressed. There is also a need to fill the gaps in the state of the art to enable the smooth operation of WLANs. I present a comprehensive requirements and gap analysis in this thesis and I also propose a few theoretical solutions for the gaps that can be considered for implementation.