channel congestion/utilization // wlc 4402 // LAP 1231/1242

[jeffreydrago]

Hello, I'm facing a problem here and spent the weekend reading this forum. This is my first post.

The facility have 25 APs on a open floor. They use Handheld computers - no notebooks - no voice.

They used to have RRM enabled. After reading a lot of threads in this forum, I disabled the RRM, and tweaked the channels.

Also disabled 1M and 2M rates...

The channel utilization for some aps went from 100% to 78%...

I think that having a 78% of channel utilizations is still high and want to ask for some advice.

All the Aps now have tx power of 5, 6 or 7.. I'm only using channels 1,6 and 11.

I do have a show running-config dump (that I used with WLC Config Analyzer) Before (before.txt) and after (after.txt) changes.

Tomorrow we will have 250+ handhelds on the network, and, I think that we might have problems with channel utilization.

I see some Aps with 20+ clients with 0 channel utilization, this is kind of bogus, because some minutes later the WLC will show the correct value...

ANY advices/suggestions are very welcome.

Tks,

Jeffrey

[Keyur Desai]

I still think the environment is too hot. I would reenable DCA and TPC globally. And disable 5.5 Mbps. Or move away from 11b and just test 11g with all rates below 9 Mbps. The scanners in this case should support 11g only.

Do you have directional antennas/external antennas  ? That could be causing some issues too. My 2 cents.

[jeffreydrago]

Hi Keyur, The main problem in re-enablilng the DCA is that it will reasign the channels every 10 minutes.

The operation on this Distribution center is very variable, and, they can have up to 80 Scanners connected to 2 Aps, and some minutes later, the same 80 scanners will roam to another area... We saw that happening and congestioning the channels and the network was very, very slow.

I can try to disable 5.5 but I`m worried about creating coverage holes.

And, yes, we are using two 1728 omni 5dbi external antennas per AP.

What would be a reasonable value for channel utilization in this scenario? <80% is ok?

Tks,

Jeffrey

[Leo Laohoo]

Not all wireless clients will support 802.11a/g.