Wireless Access

I need some info what is High Channel Utilization on the Aruba Controllers what does it affect and what steps need to be taken to fix it. As well as what is goodput and what is affects

 

- Having co-channel interference - Take a look at your AP deployment and see if there's too many APs or APs are able to hear each other too much then you should do a predictive survey or physical survey and make sure that your APs are placed properly across your campus , also look to see if there's too many rogue APs in your area

- Lower data rates - Remove lower data rates under the the SSID profile (1,5,11) but test this in a lab environment and test this against your wireless devices, if you are at a university need to be careful removing these since Wii consoles won't connect if you remove the lower data rates

- Sticky clients - If you have AOS 6.3 ClientMatch should help you with that

- Too many SSIDs - reduce the amount of  SSIDs in your network , remember that wireless is a half duplex 

 

And also enabled Airtime fairness too avoid devices with slower or older wireless card taking too much airtime and allowing faster wireless cards to have priorities

Goodput is the actual throughput of the client and excludes protocol overhead.

 

Are you expeirencing issues that you need help with or are these general queries?

Hi,

 

Does High Channel Utilization mean that there is too much traffic going between AP and clients in the specific 2.4/5 GHz channel? ____ 

 

Thus, to reduce High Channel utilization, we can spread the load from/to the client between more APs, right? ____

 

If there is no way to put in additional APs, what parameters can we configure to achieve a higher throughput and/or reduce the Channel Utilization? ____

That means there is too much activity on a channel. It could be traffic, interference or a combination of both. You can help by:

- dropping broadcast and multicast (broadcast applications are not efficient and are typically designed for wired networks and waste a lot of traffic)
- reduce the number of access points on a channel by making the channel size 20 MHz instead of 40 or 80.
- remove lower rates - management traffic and data will be sent at higher, faster rates and use less time to do it. Some clients will even roam better when you remove the lower rates
- if you have clients that support dfs, enable some dfs channels, so that other channels can be used. If most of your clients do not scan on dfs channels, this is not an option.
- locate and remove interference like unauthorized wireless and microwave ovens and wireless video cameras.


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Hi Colin,

 

The information is very very useful!