When you design a network, there are many things to consider, such as the different hardware and software options available. The wide variety of choices can be slightly overwhelming unless you are familiar with how each interacts with the others to produce the desired results. It is important to know what choices you have, what each product does, and how each product relates to and works with one another. What is the anticipated network load going to be? Is this site a new or existing deployment? Will most users be indoors or outdoors? There are so many things to think about and so many choices to make. By investigating the different options and having prior knowledge of their capabilities, you can narrow down the list to make your selection job a lot easier. But even before device selection, you need to understand how Cisco enterprise wireless networks work, what kind of deployment options they offer, and which protocols those network devices are using to communicate.

Where should you connect your access points to, what kind of switches should you use, and how do you configure them to support your wireless network? In addition, how do you leverage Power-Over-Ethernet to power access points, and how much bandwidth should you reserve on your distribution layers for traffic originating from the wireless network? Are there any networking protocols that can help you drive a wireless network? When you are designing a wireless network, you must realize that wireless is just one of the methods for accessing the enterprise network. Therefore, it is crucial for you to understand exactly how the wireless network components integrate within the rest of your network.