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In NYC there are many incumbent Wi-Fi providers; the Harlem Wi-Fi network, the Alliance for Downtown New York
and the Downtown Brooklyn and other business improvement districts, Transit Wireless underground subway
locations, as well as the thousands of kiosks being installed on the streets. All are independent, free, public Wi-Fi
networks. New York is looking at a way to make a ubiquitous footprint, to federate this group and to have them work
under a policy where they would have seamless roaming in their city.
New York has more than hotspots; it has large corridors of coverage areas. What the city is doing is becoming a
network operator, and beginning to take a look at where each one of these access points are. Their current standard
of operation, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and then taking a look at the physical characteristics in terms of their longitude,
latitude and the heights of where these access points are. They’re building a real world service area and they’re
federating their incumbents. At the end of the day, they’re creating what they call a ‘Wi-Fi heartbeat.’

8.4 Network Performance

In a Wi-Fi roaming environment, there are likely to be a large number of relatively small Wi-Fi Network Providers. An
airport, a convention center, outdoor deployment and perhaps other venues, may all be a part of a user Wi-Fi roaming
experience. Thus, for the network service provider to deliver a compelling experience Service Level Agreements may
be agreed and defined to establish roaming. The implementation of Performance Indicators will facilitate the
harmonization of the experience for the end user and align the network performance to maintain an end-to-end
quality of the WLAN roaming service between networks.

Quality of Experience must be managed by the network provider to achieve service experience levels expected by the
user. This includes: network reliability that provides expected throughput targets; supported mobility across access
points (AP) within the Wi-Fi network to ensure a seamless user experience and support of multi advanced service
differentiation (such as the ability to support premium video) and mobile multi-media across APs. Underlying these
technical attributes is the need for radio conformance to radio protocols and air interface interoperability of devices
and APs.

To provide a consistent user experience and managed quality of service (QoS), the Wi-Fi network needs to be
manageable by a provider using existing standards and techniques adopted by the industry. Network providers need
to manage policies and to support QoS with measureable results, including in highly dense interference
environments. Network faults need to be automatically detected and reported to the operator’s management system.
Effective and dynamic radio resource management is essential to realize network quality. Radio resource
management on a massive scale (hundreds of thousands to millions of APs) requires conformance to radio protocol
standards across vendor products. Dynamic load sharing across multi-band operations is needed as well as the use of
interference mitigation techniques in dense deployments. Network providers need to manage their networks to
optimize coverage, throughput and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Interoperability of management systems for the Wi-Fi network is essential in order to provide End-to-End
management of the Wi-Fi network and to provide command and control capabilities from a Network Management
Centre, for successful network operations to meet the network’s management metrics.

Network manageability starts with standards-based provisioning of devices, APs and infrastructure. This includes
auto-configuration and remote configuration methods. Network manageability includes automated troubleshooting
and network optimization to help ensure reliable network performance to measureable KPIs. Load Management with
optimal resource allocation are essential capabilities. Load and traffic conditions need to be reported to the Network
Management Centre in a timely basis. Management capabilities to support regulatory compliance can be considered
as well.

Report title: Connected City Blueprint
43 Issue Date: 15 December 2016 Wireless Broadband Alliance Confidential & Proprietary.
Copyright © 2016 Wireless Broadband Alliance
Document Version: 1.0