Wireless Access

Hi

What would be the best way to achieve a high available WLAN for a production / warehouse environment?

Basically, the WLAN must be available at all times. Controller  reduncancy is taken care of (fast failover).

The ceilings in these areas are up to 15m in height, with warehouses up to 25m to be build soon.

The current setup is done with an extra, standby AP, next to each AP. In case of an AP failure, the standby AP is manually enabled. I would assume that this is not the best way to go.

Aruba ARM can take care of an access point failure, but I've also heard that it is best to limit the ARM min/max settings to +/- 3dBm difference (ex 18 & 21 dBm) to get a 'stable' environment.

My question is: how do I setup ARM to make it possible to compensate the failure of an AP, taking the high ceilings into account?

What AP/Antenna models are you using?

A common methodology is to do a more dense deployment of APs to provide what we would call "200%" coverage, basically meaning every place you expect coverage has ideal RF provided from two nearby APs. In those cases, you must be using 5Ghz as your priary medium and likely will require DFS as well. In the "200% Coverage" model, if an AP fails, the area that AP covers is already being covered by another AP. Nearby APs may need to go up a bit in power but in general no major RF changes occur. The drawback to this, outside of more APs getting deployed, is that if it's already a dense deployment, you have more ACI/CCI (esp in the 2.4Ghz bands). 

You also may have to look at using APs with external antennas that use more narrow RF beamwidths (like the 60deg antennas downfiring) such as to minimize the RF ACI from AP to AP and create more cellularized coverage like what we would do with a VHD deployment. It would be best to directly engage with your local Aruba account team that can look over your warehouse designs and help develop a more overlap-based redundancy model as opposed to a cold-standby model.

Hi Jerrod

For the deployment it isn't sure yet what is going to be used. Probably AP205s and where needed AP228 and/or AP275s.

I was thinking about changing the coverage index ARM parameters to compensate for the height.

Does this make sense?

Br

Peter