Wireless Access

Good afternoon. 

 

I have been tasked with reviewing a wireless install in a large corporate office that includes multiple (~10) conference rooms all together down a long corridor, on both sides.  Currently their is an AP 105 inside every conference room, and I'm told the previous engineer did no ARM configuration to lower the Minimum tx rates.  I feel pretty confident there must be a lot of co-channel or adjacent channel interference down this long hallway of conference rooms.  One of the first things I'm going to do is enable band steering and moce as many clients as possible off the 2.4 gHz air space.

 

We will be upgrading almost all the APs to 135s.  My question is inside these conference rooms, does it make more sense to:

A)  Delete some AP locations and install new ones in alternating conference rooms.

B)  Use an AP with a smaller radio in the conference rooms (105-f1?)

C  Replace all APs with new 135s, but lower the ARM profile minimum tx rate so that the conference room APs aren't as likely to step on each other?

Please forgive spelling mistakes.

 

It looks like you are on the right track 

 

- Enabling ARM is the right thing to do

- Make sure you do a survey to determine that power levels will be best to use 

- What type of wall structure those conference have?

- Band steering is the way to go and also enable Air fairness 

- How are you planning to mount the APs ?

 

You should read these :

http://www.arubanetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/802_11nVRDV8_20110913.pdf

http://www.arubanetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/Indoor80211n_2012-05-31.pdf

http://www.arubanetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/DG_HighDensity_VRD.pdf

 

 

And watch this video :

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Community-Knowledge-Base/VIDEO-Wireless-Design-for-the-All-Wireless-Office/ta-p/74544

Thanks, APs will be mounted on ceiling grid.  I believe I see what you mean by seeing what power requirements are estimated.  I guess I can just build it out in RF Plan, and do the "Focus on this AP" thing and see what it estimates the power to be, and ensure the minimum tx rate will accomodate that estimate.

 

For example, if it says: Ch: 1  TxPwr: 8 dBm

 

Make sure to drop the minimum default tx rate from 9 in the ARM profile to 8.

If you have Airwave you could use the VisualRF but if you don't then you could use the Standalone version which I use when I'm still in the planning stage of my project .

And If you have the autocad file to import the tool even better .

But the power levels should be determine based on :
- how close the APs are from each other (density)
- the type of building structure (type of walls)

I am not sure which code are you running on the controller. If you are on 6.3 than Client Match will take care of connecting clients to the closest AP, also steering them to righ band and distributing them across the availble spectrum on its own. It is enabled by default.

 

If you are on any code earlier then that, then enable Band Steering to move clients to 5GHz if they are capable of it. Also enabling ARM will help AP to select right channel and power level. Also If AP find that on the channel it is operating right now has more interference compare to some other channel availble, then AP will change the channel.

 

One more option is Mode Aware ARM, which will check if there is more than required coverage, then automatically convert some APs/Radios into Air Monitor to reduce ACI and CCI. Not many customers use this option as mostly they will have right amount of coverage based on site survey.

 

I recommend only enabling Mode Aware ARM on 2.4 Ghz radios,  When you have relatively dense 5 Ghz coverage your 2 Ghz coverage will have a greater footprint based on propagation characteristics of that frequency band,    This causes ACI and CCI (Adjacent Channel Interference and Co-Channel Interference)   

 

what happens in these cases is generally 1/3-1/2 of b/g radios are turned off creating a much better 2.4 Ghz environment due to reduction in interference.