Wireless Access

Hi All,

 

One question that i get too often from customer and partners alike is, how many users can connect simultaneously to Aruba Access point (whether instant or CAP, i assume it doesnt make any difference).

 

This fact in my view usually comes from Ruckus as they boost large number of concurrent users as well as long range.

 

Do we have any info on that ? how many concurrent users can connect to aruba AP at one time ?

theoretically it is 255. that number will depend on the model of AP you use. just recently I've seen 91 users on an IAP-205 in a large coffee chain resto.

again, it depends also what these users are doing, if all 91 were sending/receiving traffic, not sure the 205 would handle that smoothly and probably should be replaced with a 225.

you should be thinking more in terms of what these users will be doing with the Wi-Fi then how many an AP can support, this will determine how many APs you need

Hi,

This is what I needed to understand. Do we have any document or criteria on which we can define how many users will simultaneously connect ?

Like let's say I am sitting with a customer and based on their requirement, I am pitching IAP-215, and they ask me how many users will it support ? so what I need to do to find that answer ?

Best Regards

Ovais Iqbal

Since other brands (Ruckus) are pitching to customer thats they can connect x number of users per AP, what shall be our response.

 

Do we have any matrix or specs sheet that highlights how many users can connect to a single AP ?

 

I totally agree with you that this might not be possible because it highly depends on what the user shall be doing but again, for competition, we need to provide this info.

 

please guide

see this thread, i guess it depends on what the customer wants to hear. if they believe the rukus story about x users then they will also believe the 255 per radio one. if they want to actually think about it then they will listen to the full story.

 

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Unified-Wired-Wireless-Access/AP-225-Maximum-Concurrent-Users/td-p/166390

There are two issues here:

• how many users can be supported, depending upon their traffic mix
• an absolute cap on connections

Assume you have 30 users on one AP, and each is trying to open 5 concurrent connections.  Things will go badly if the AP has a cap of 128 concurrent connections.

 

Wireless vendors should clearly state the maximum number of concurrent connections for each AP and software version.  Why is it so hard to find this information?

 

Jerry J. Anderson, CCIE #5000

That is because, at the wifi layer, "connections" to do not map 1:1 with TCP connections. A "connection" can consume more resources depending on something like the distance of that device from the access point or, humidity, or say, interference is present.  That is because in wifi, resources are shared and performance can very greatly. In a closed system like wired networks with little to no sharing of resources, it is much easier to predict those numbers.

Additionally, we need to clarify terminology here. Client connection to an AP, and TCP/UDP 'sessions' per client are two different things. ccie5000's comment that '30 users each trying to open 5 connections' is a bit of a misnomer in terms of AP capactiy in regards to number of clients.

 

One wireless client can only have one physical 'connection' to an AP at a time (a wifi layer MAC link). Then said users will generally open applications that create TCP or UDP sessions across said connection. When the default settings are looked at, where the max client connctions are 64 or 128 per radio, that is the number of wifi MAC layer connections allowed on the AP per radio (and is configurable UP TO 255 if you want to just be silly). Most average clients will have 20-60 TCP or UDP sessions active at any one time. with 60 clients per AP (which would be high but easily attainable, that's only 3600 TCP and UDP sessions total across 60 client connections. And that would be a VERY high session count and would be very transient in nature, but the connection count would be fixed at the number of wifi clients associated.