Wireless Access

Hello everyone.

I am experiencing a similar issue, however bandwidth contracts are not in place. We are however connecting to the local controller through a branch office VPN tunnel. The wireless connection is horrible, however, the ethernet connection works fine. Could this be the manner in which the ap sends data back to the controller? I am running aruba os 6.4.2.14 with 225 AP's. This is happening at other remote offices as well.

How long has this been happening?

Do you have "Drop Broadcast and Unknown Multicast" enabled on all of your virtual APs?

Thanks for your quick response Curtis. Yes, Drop Broadcast and unknown multicast option is checked on the Master controller.

Is it checked for all Virtual APs?  How many SSIDs are you broadcasting?

We are currently utilizing three VAP's. Two of which have the drop broadcast and unknown multicast option checked and are certainly having the issue. The other, I have not been able to test. The issue (I think) lies within the default provisioning of the AP's themselves. This is fine where all AP's are directly connected to same subnet as the controller (by either a fiber circuit or in same physical location as controllers) but at the remote sites, where they are "tunneled" back to our main office, we see the severe degregation in network performance. In one speed test today, I had 0mbps down and .2 up...but at sites that are on the same local network, anywhere from 50-85 mbps. It leads me to believe the AP's are either not provisioned properly, or that the payload is encrypted via IPSEC at the AP, then sent through another IPSEC tunnel back to the controller and that is where the issue lies.

I would consider turning on "Drop" on the third Virtual AP as well.

Are the APS configured as Remote APS, or regular Campus APS?

What is the wan technology being used?  Serialization delays, MTU and general WAN instability can contribute to performance degradation when all traffic is tunneled back to the controller.

From what I can tell, the AP's are configured identically across all of the sites. This particular sites WAN architecture is simply a broadband internet connection with a VPN tunnel back to our main office VPN Firewall/Router. It looks like on the "remote" controller (in remote, it is still located in same office as the "local" controller but used for remote sites) has the MTU set at 1200. The ap's are set to tunnel. Are you suggesting increasing the MTU?

So Edit from my previous post. The MTU is set to 1500.

Is this new, or has it always been happening?

What is the bandwidth between both sites and what devices create the VPN tunnel?

This is something that has always happened with our remote sites not directly connected with a fiber circuit. the bandwidth is 50/10 and a juniper VPN router creates the tunnel back to the main office.

How long have you had remote sites on wireless?

They've been on wireless since the early 2000's. However, all of the sites were previously on CISCO AP's with no issues. This only started happening upon switching to the Arubas and Aruba WLC.

Do you know who installed the Aruba System?  You could start by asking them why the performance change..

There are quite a few things that could be at play here, but I don't have enough information to know why you are having performance issues.  The person who installed the system, however, might be able to shed some light on it.