Greetings Airheads Community,
I have a question regarding a high-density deployment and how ARM would work in a given configuration.
The site in question is a large convention center where one of my clients will be holding an event, they have a high deisnty deployment of Aruba AP135's throughout the facility.
On the main show floors (big open spaces, APs mounted ~12m up in the air) we are aiming to manage the wireless networks that the various vendors will bring with them to the show, as well as providing free wifi for atendees.
Our management of the various vendors networks will take two forms:
1) Provide them with an AP on their stand, managed by the venues controllers, this is our preferred method.
2) Allocate them a 20MHz 5GHz channnel or two if they are insistent on using their own gear and can show some level of technical competence in how it should be configured and installed.
To help give the vendors (and hopefully the public) a better QoE we want to effectively clear down some 5GHz channels for their use on the show floor, in other words poke some holes in the channel list that ARM will use to configure the APs the public will be using and use those exclusively for the APs serving the vendors.
We proposed the following to the venue (sorry if some of my terminolgy regarding the config under ArubaOS is wrong - I'm new to Aruba, but not high-density environments!).
All the APs that are mounted high level would be used for the public SSID only, configure the AP group with a custom regulatory domain profile that would exclude 5-6 channels from its use, based on the density of APs we expect to deploy for the vendors and those in the air for the public that should give us sufficient channels to work out a sensible reuse pattern.
Configure the APs being installed onto vendors booths with a different regulatory domain profile allowing only those channels excluded from the public APs.
Our intention here was to allow ARM to manage the radios, as ideally that allows for channels to be co-ordinated by the controller across both groups of APs and allows for dynamic management and interference mitigation as the APs should be able to automatically adjust their channels if needed.
Can anybody forsee any complications that would arise from such a configuration - this is a technique that I have used many times before on other vendors gear, but I am generally unfamiliar with Aruba and how the automattic RF management works on the controllers.
If there are real reasons why such a configuration wouldn't be recommended would anybody like to suggest an alternative method to acheive the same result, I'd like to avoid manually setting AP channels as to give you an idea of scale there are about 40-50 APs installed into one of these halls (and I have 3 of them to deal with) and we we will likely add another 10-15 to cater for specfiic vendors needs in each hall.
Thanks in advance,
Will