Wireless Access

We have a moderately high density deployment in a classroom / labs building, and my preliminary simulation (via Ekahau ESS) suggested that I'll want to disable some 2.4 GHz radios to avoid too much contention in the 2.4 GHz bands in some areas.

 

However, it is not obvious 1) how to pick which radios to disable; 2) How to actually apply this setting to some of the APs; and 3) Does it make sense to put these "extra" 2.4 radios in Air Monitor mode, or should I disable them?

 

(This is the first building we've converted to Aruba; previously was a lower densitiy "APs in hallways" Juniper/Trapeze system.)

 

At this point, we have the new APs installed, with all 2.4 GHz radios active.

 

For 1), the Mobility Controller's Dashboard > Performance panel with 2.4 GHz radios selected shows some APs that have high numbers for "Channel Busy" and "Interference", and lower "Channel Quality", but there are different APs in each group, and I'm not sure what the different categories indicate. E.g. is "Interference" from APs not on our system that are on channels other than 1,6,11; whereas "channel busy" indicates lots of traffic from other APs on the same channel?

 

Also, in general, how will these numbers change based on the specific automatic channel assignments? In the ESS simiulation, I can disable selected radios and see how the interference changes, but it matters which APs on different floors get assigned to the same 2.4GHz channel.

 

Then, for 2), what's the cleanest / best / easiest way to have some 2.4 radios disabled? Currently, we have an AP group per building, with a total of 13 buildings on campus, and we have our campus-wide set of SSIDs assigned to each of these AP groups. All of the groups currently use the same RF Management > 802.11g radio > "11-G-RADIO-PROFILE", and it seems that only the "Radio enable" and/or "Mode" settings of this would need to change for a "No-2.4" profile. But the trick is what's the best way to get this profile only to selected APs?

 

Should I copy each of these AP groups to a "no-2.4" version of the group, and then provision the selected APs in each building to this other group? Downside seems to be keeping all the groups in sync as we change settings -- that is already a pain with our current "group per building" scheme, and I'd rather not make it twice as bad.

 

Or, is there an easy way to add a "no-2.4" AP Specific profile, that would change just the 2.4 radio mode, but that would leave all other settings at the values specificed by the AP Group? In this case, I could give specific radios this AP Specific profile

 

Finally, for 3), any downside to having these extra 2.4 radios in monitor mode rather than disabling them?

 

Thanks for any clues you can provide.

Steve

 

What EIRP values do you have assigned under ARM for the 2.4 Ghz ?

Hi Victor,

 

We followed the "RF and Roaming Optimization for Aruba 802.11ac Networks" document for the settings, so for 2.4 GHz we use Min 6 and Max 9.

 

To get solid 5GHz coverage, we have more 2.4 GHz coverage than we really need.  Can we turn the Min setting down to 3, or is it better to just disable some radios?

If you have airwave and all your AP deployment maps have all your deployed APs added in VisualRF then you can do a preliminary assessment of how your 2.4 GHz coverage .

Ideally you want to do a physical wireless survey and see what type of coverage you currently have and then determine what areas you have too much 2.4 GHz coverage.

Thanks. And for the nuts and bolts of turning off some 2.4 radios? Separate AP groups? Or AP specific settings?   (Is there a way to change only the 2.4 radio setting, and track everything else from the existing AP group?)

 

Steve