Controller Based WLANs

Product and Software: This article applies to all Aruba controllers and ArubaOS versions.

This feature allows bundling of multiple fast/gigabit Ethernet ports with same speed, duplex, and VLAN to form a single logical channel. This allows load sharing among the participating ports and also helps in redundancy in event link failure with the bundled ports. This is typically used to uplink traffic from one switch to another. The group of ports participating in the same channel should belong to the same VLAN with same speed and duplex settings or should be a bundle of trunk links.

In terms of load sharing, the frame/traffic distributions between the participating ports are based on a hashing algorithm. The algorithm would use the source and destination IP address in the packet if the ether-type of the frame is set to 'IP', else it would use the source and destination MAC address of the frame if the ether-type is set to 'non-ip'. Based on the hash, the frame traverses across the calculated port.

The general assumption is that the data-frame distributions among the ports are done in 'round-robin' fashion; however there is a hashing mechanism to determine the data-frame distribution for more versatility.