Wireless Troubleshooting and Security

Week 8 Discussion (20 Points): “Wireless Troubleshooting and Security” Please respond to the following:

Imagine that the wireless operations team has identified an issue related to the reliability and performance of the wireless network. After careful observation, you have noted that the AP interface pointing to the wired network is performing inconsistently and there is a significant slowdown on Voice over WLAN when the port is operational. Propose the main steps that you would take in the troubleshooting process and discuss the tools that would help you achieve a solution. Choose the tool you believe to be the most useful in this troubleshooting process and justify your choice.

From Part 1 of this discussion, suggest the main steps that you would take to ensure that Wireless LAN components are not compromised in the troubleshooting process as a result of this security issue. Provide a rationale to support your response.

Week 8 Response:

The wireless operations team has identified an issue related to the reliability and performance of the wireless network. After careful observation, I noted that the AP interface pointing to the wired network is performing inconsistently and there is a significant slowdown on Voice over WLAN when the port is operational. In this scenario, I would implement quality of service (QoS) features on the integrated services router or access point (AP). Wired networks enforce QoS while wireless networks manage QoS for traffic to clients; therefore, an examination of the flow of traffic wirelessly and wired is necessary. To implement QoS in the wireless network, ensure VLANs (if used) are configured on the access point before configuring QoS. Then ensure full awareness of wireless traffic. While configuring QoS on the AP, I would select specific network traffic to prioritize and use congestion-management and congestion-avoidance techniques to prioritized traffic. This will ensure the network performs more predictably and ensure bandwidth utilization is more effective. Then I would create QoS policies and apply the policies to the VLANs configured on your access point. If you do not use VLANs on your network, you can apply your QoS policies to the access point’s Ethernet and radio ports.

To address the slowdown on Voice over WLAN, I would check AP for loopback interface configurations. A loopback interface configuration can generate an Inter-AP Protocol General Information (IAPP GENINFO) storm on the network, which can result in high CPU utilization on the AP. This can slow down the performance of the AP drastically and, in some cases, disrupt network traffic completely. Loopback interface configurations can also cause memory allocation failures.

The main steps I would take to ensure that Wireless LAN components are not compromised in the troubleshooting process as a result of the security issue would be to ensure proper implementation of QoS.