Wireless Access

Hi,

I am looking into various stats coming from WLAN environment and I am wondering if anyone can guide me to what's considered normal values for these stats in a typical loaded WLAN environment and not considered radio or AP issue:

Tx_dropped (what drop ratio is considered normal)
tx_retried (what retry ratio is considered normal)
Rx_frame_errors (what frame error ratio is considered normal)

Any pointers would be helpful.

thanks,

Atif

Unfortunately, each environment is different.  An environment with more users and higher density will have more drops and errors; that is simply the nature of it.

It is best to measure these parameters at midnight when nobody is in the building.  If these parameters are at 20% at midnight, you could (1) reduce the power on APs (2) Enable Broadcast Filtering (3) reduce the number of SSIDs (4) optionally you could remove some of the lower transmit rates...

I understand that every environment is different but I still need to benchmark. So in a typical healthy environment with regular load, low co-channel interference and other radio related issues, what is acceptable. For example in a wired environment 1-2% packet/frame drop is not considered good. I want to know how can I benchmark it for my WLAN.

Thanks,

Atif

In a wired lan, 100% packet throughput is expected.  Wireless is a contention-based medium, so a certain percentage of packets will not get through the first time.  The more packets and users, and that percentage can go up.  What is the percentage and how much does it increase?  You have to baseline your network when you have no complaints and then compare it to a time when you do....

To me 70% drops is unusable, 50% is bad, but that is just what I think....