Community Tribal Knowledge Base

Attached is the presentation from Airheads Vegas 2012. A similar version was also presented at Airheads Rio 2010 and Airheads Dallas 2011. It is a must for wireless networking engineers who are challenged with supporting environments such as auditoriums, classrooms, meeting rooms where high density of mobile devices need to connect to the wireless network. Topics of discussion will include capacity planning, RF design strategies (floor, side, overhead coverage) and real world examples.

Topics covered include: 

Why are high density environments so challenging?

• Shared Medium Access
• Limited Number of Channels
• Co-Channel Interference
• Limited number of 5 GHz capable clients
• Bad client behavior
• Application Delivery Throughput Requirements 

How to perform capacity planning?

• Device count 
• Channel count
• Target performance per device
• Total reserve vs. capacity
• Validation of capacity goal

What are the RF design strategies?

• Overhead coverage (ceiling mount APs)
• Side coverage (wall mount APs)
• Floor coverage (under the floor APs)
• Adjacent HD WLANs

How to configure ArubaOS for HD WLANs?

• Optimal channel distribution
• Optimal client distribution
• Optimal power control
• Optimal airtime management

Real world example

• University auditorium, 322 seats
• 8x AP-125s, HT20 11n design
• ~50 laptops, ~350 iPhones + iPods