Wireless Access

We currently have a AP-105 deployment with AP's about every 40' in an office building.

The EIRP of many of the g radios is at a minimum 3.  I'm looking into disabling some of the basic/transmit rates on the g radios.  Is there any recommendations on settings for the Basic Rates and Transmit Rates?

Thanks in advance!

My WLAN set at: (These numbers were documented somewhere in this community):

802.11g Basic Rates                               11 12
802.11g Transmit Rates                            11 12 18 24 36 48 54

Another approach you could use (and I would recommend ;)) assuming you just want clients to connect to their nearest access points as your goal here.... would be to approach the scenario here by 'bumping up'  "Local Probe Request Threshold (dB)"  instead of  tweaking the basic rates.     I assume you are just trying to get clients to connect to the best (nearest) access point and thus have a positive experience.   Setting the value of this field up to a setting like 30 (since you have a dense deployment) will make sure clients connect to the nearest APs most of the time... thus they all start using the high rates anyways...

Also, consider the most advanced of the tools you have available Aruba ClientMatch (one check box, but a powerful one!) to have the Aruba Controller 'help' your clients out in selecting the 'best AP' on an ongoing basis. 

JF

We do have ClientMatch on, and have set the Low RSSI Threshold to 20.  We've also set the Local Probe Request Threshold (dB) to 25.  I just want to make sure we're doing all we can!  It was suggested that turning off the 2.4ghz radios is not a good solution for a dense deployment, rather 'encourage' clients to only connect at the higher data rates.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Great approach.  You have some significant 'fire power' in play to keep the clients 'behaving' as-is.

I would have a look at "Client Health"   (Found on AOS Dashboard on Controller and better yet within the Airwave RF Performance Dashboard)

Look to see how many of your clients are getting "Green" marks for health and how many are getting less than that.  

That should tell-the-tale as to how the controls you have put in place are already working.  

Count me curious :)

JF

Attached picture showing Airwave RF Performance.

Great data!

Thanks for sharing.     

So our 'candidate' clients to investigate  (at least eyeball) would be the '7' in the _red_ for health and potentially the '16' in the _red_ for SNR.    Likely some of those are the same, so let's say round number '20' .

The way I would look at it and/or summarize to others:  

20 of almost 400 clients == 5%...  aka.  95% of clients are in the excellent zone, 5% aren't.

"and of the 5% that aren't, we found ..... " (that's where the eyeballing them comes in to see why these may be 'real' issues, corner cases, or nothing to worry about)

JF