Wireless Access

We are testing Multicast over wireless. We are running code 6.4.4. We noticed when we have more than 150 Multicast clients receiving streams, the quality is affected. Is there any limitation on the Controller? Say which model can support how many clients / how much throughput?

I guess this is done by the Controller CPU thus is software based feature? We were just testing 150-Clients * 3Mbps-stream.

Thanks.

Trying to send 450 megabits of unicast traffic is alot of traffic to attempt to send from wired to wireless.  Even if you could send that amount of traffic onto the wireless, the RF utilization would hurt all of the other clients attempting to use the wireless medium.  I would try to keep the DMO threshold at maybe 15 or below, so that anything above that, it would send it as as broadcast, which would consume much less CPU and much less RF utilization.  You could also remove some of the lower rates on the SSID, and also dscp tag the multicast traffic so that whem multicast occurs, there would be less RF utilization and it will prioritize it over other wireless traffic for reliability.

Thanks. Remember 450Mbps is over 6 AP, so I don't think the RF utilization is an issue if we plan well (so AP will be in different 5GHz channels). We can't leave client above 15 to use multicast over the air, the quality will be very bad due to no re-transmission for multicast.

I just need to know if there any HW limitation for converting multicast to unicast for each controller model. We did find the old 6000 controller had very poor performance converting MC to UC. Even one stream will have very bad video quality. Then we change to a newer model, then it's much better. Then we hit this 150 clients 'limit'. I just want to know the limitation to avoid any waste of time keep trying.