Wireless Access

Hi community,

 

We have a scenario at one of our sites at which we need to maintain a legacy Cisco wireless infrastructure and associated SSIDs, whilst also implementing a new Aruba infrastructure with the same SSIDs. One of which is used for wireless voice. All far from ideal I know.

 

We are experiencing call quality issues at the site. I suspect this is as a result of the two sets of infrastructure but am having difficulty proving this. I have had a look in the ARM information of the Aruba and on certain Aruba APs I can see Cisco APs advertising the same SSID and some are even on the same channel as the Aruba APs. Whilst I know this is far from ideal, I was looking for some guidance on any CLI commands that may support this theory. The site is a remote site the other side of the world and we are having great difficulty pin-pointing the issue. In the dashboard of the Aruba controller all of the widgets show good metrics for channel health, interference, etc.

 

Troubleshooting voice isn't really a strong point of mine, so appreciate any tips. I've been through the various design guides for both Aruba and the Cisco handset (7925) and we have enabled all of the suggested configurations, but we are still struggling. I know this could be one of many things causing this, just looking for a little direction as to where would be the best place to start for troubleshooting. I strongly suspect the site is expecting the roaming transition from the Cisco to the Aruba to be seamless, and this is likely the root cause of the issue.

 

Thanks

It is not recommended to do this specially when APs from different vendors are advertising the same SSIDs in the same RF Domain because the Cisco WLC / AP and Aruba WLC / AP wont share information about the roaming device.

So when the device roams from Cisco AP to an Aruba AP the device will need to start the authentication all over again and for wireless VoIP that's very disruptive

Hi Victor,

 

Understood. But as I say, this is an unfortunate scenario we are having to deal with. Thanks for the note regarding the authentication. We use PSK and MAC auth for the phones. We do see roaming working reasonably well between the two infrastructures, but obviously acknowledge this is far from ideal if in a voice call. For now unfortunately we have to make the best of a bad situation. Any advice on CLI commands used for voice troubleshooting in such scenarios?

Please implement QBSS on the Aruba APs.   This will prevent roaming between the two WLAN.   The trick is to make the Aruba APs look better than the Cisco APs.   This can be acheived by playing with the SSID and ARM profiles.    Without knowing the configuration of the Cisco WLAN and Aruba WLAN and distance between APs,  I cannot provide any recommendations.

 

Thanks,

--Kevin