Abstract
In educational institutions, we are faced with the fact that when planning a campus network, we have to take into account constant changes not only in the technologies for providing access to the network, but also in the devices themselves that connect to the network of the educational institution. Every new year, students arrive with more and more modern models of laptops, smartphones and it is not always convenient for them to use the devices provided by the institution. Even modern devices are already striving for compactness and lightness, which reduces the number of connectors in them, and the size of the Ethernet port does not at all contribute to the compactness of the device. Moving to a wireless network, we provide more flexibility and do not get tied to the end devices.
Modern trends in educational technologies dictate new requirements for bandwidth and latency within the network. Given the traffic of services being currently deployed in educational institutions, their network needs to be reconfigured to meet these new requirements.
Fortunately, the devices and technologies responsible for providing network access are also moving forward and are constantly being updated and developed.
In the first part of this paper, the authors analyze the weaknesses of the existing university communications network. The main characteristics that will be analyzed in this part will be presented both by classical bandwidth and more complex topics such as network monitoring and security.
One of the vectors of the development of modern science is the Wi-Fi 6 technology, also known as IEEE 802.11ax, which would be a subject of the second part of this article. This standard's important advantage is the increase of data transfer rate that could be achieved by using the technologies of OFDMA modulation and MU-MIMO, which makes it possible to increase the number of possible connections. This is required due to significant increase of students and teachers and therefore devices. It provides the opportunities for convenient work with the IoT, because of built-in specific functions. In addition, Wi-Fi 6 provides low latency, which is necessary for effective work with virtual and augmented reality applications. This is important due to common implementation of these topics into educational programs.
It should be noted that the presented article uses the data collected in BMSTU during the pilot project on implementation of Wi-Fi 6 as the only technology to connect end users.