Opinion - Thoughts on reliable Heat-Mapping

I recently saw yet another piece of vender marketing materials espousing all the benefits of Heat-Mapping and how great it is. It got me thinking. Maybe we need a better way to visualize our networks. What if we had the ability to provide additional information to our Wireless Network Management System (WNMS) regardless of platform? When I took the Cisco ENWLSI class in late 2020, one thing that got me questioning the reliability of Heat-Mapping tools, like the one found in Cisco Prime Infrastructure, is that these tools are only based on information that the WLAN is able to read from the 802.11 frame headers. To my knowledge, there isn't a good way for the clients to tell the network what they are experiencing.

I'm not up to date with the current proposals in the IEEE 802.11 working group but, it seems to me that there could be a solution in plain sight. What if we included basic network telemetry reporting information in certain frames, such as; (RA) RSSI and (RA) SNR in ACKs, Block ACKs, Association and Re-Association Frames? I think these few small bits of information added to the Frame Header wouldn't add too much overhead, but if introduced into the standard would allow for WNMS solutions to account for client feedback if mapped properly. This could perhaps be paired with the data in BLE Beacons and AoA information and may prove useful in my opinion. This data wouldn't need to be interpreted for frames as the WLAN sends them to clients, but could provide valuable data for the client-side of the network, which seems to have poor reporting capabilities due to lack of standards.

lf you know of something like this in the works, please drop a comment, I would love to be corrected. If you've anything to add or correct me on, please leave comment.