Application Considerations

Applications play a significant role in the determination of a wireless implementation.
Due to the high bandwidth utilization of some applications, you may
need to modify or completely remove a wireless design as an infrastructure solution.
If the high bandwidth and/or high traffic application is not necessary on
the wireless system you intend to deploy, you should filter that application’s
traffic from the wireless network by installing a router between the wireless segment
and the wired segment.
Graphics-intensive applications, such as desktop publishing and computer
aided design (CAD) programs, can have significant impact on a wireless design
depending on how the applications are used on the network. For example, if
these files are stored on a shared network device such as a file server, there will
be some network impact each time a user stores or retrieves a file.Typically, these
files are large (20 MB or more), and if the number of users is large and/or they
store or retrieve files frequently, the impact on the network becomes greater.The
same is true for file transfer applications.To determine if the impact on the network
is significant enough to justify changing or removing your wireless design,
you should perform a baseline of network utilization for the existing network.A
device or program known as a protocol analyzer can give you this information
by monitoring the number, type, and size of packets traversing the network over
a period of time. Network management programs, such as Ciscoworks and HP
Openview, will also give you this type of information.