Colin, thanks for the quick response. The OP and I work together.
We generally avoid AP's in hallways unless the professional survey we had done says to put an AP in a hallway, which is rare.
We've not had this problem before this year and we might have added 10 or 15 access points in that time. Between last year and this year we made a handful of changes recommended by an ACE engineer and also upgraded from AOS 6.4 to AOS 6.5 to support AP-300 series AP's and tunneled node on the new Aruba/HPE switches.
Recommended changes are:
- Reduce ARM EIRP to 9 for 2.4GHz and 15 for 5GHz
- Used to be 6 to 12 for 2.4GHz and 12 to 18 for 5GHz
- Set wireless A and G beacon rates to 12.
- This was prevoiusly not set on any SSID.
- Set max clients per SSID to 64
- Used to be 150 for our most-used SSID, no limit on our second most-used SSID
- Set basic and transmit rates for A and G to 12 and 24 for basic rates, 12, 24, 36, 48, 54 for transmit rates for all SSID's
- Most-used SSID used to have 12, 18, 24 for A basic rates, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 54 for A transmit rates, 9, 11, 12 for G basic rates, and 9, 11, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 54 for transmit rates.
- Second most-used SSID used to have no limit on A basic and transmit rates, G basic rates of 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, and G transmit rates of 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 54.
I'm debating rolling back the power level changes, the max client associations change, and the basic and transmit rate changes one by one to see what effect they have on the environment.
"Most used SSID" has about 5,000 clients right now and uses WPA2-Enterprise, "second most used SSID" has about 1,000 clients right now and is open/MAC auth, generally for things not smart enough to support WPA2-Enterprise.
Our SE also suggested setting up AP fast failover as a mechanism to mitigate the impact of these issues.
We also seem to have this issue the most when class gets out and people begin moving around the campus a lot, although it persists from about 10am every day to about 2:30pm or 3pm every day.
We do also have a TAC case open and our SE is involved in the case as well, we're just wondering if the community has any other input to share.
Thanks for your help again, Colin!