Clean Air Troubles

[phillip.vansickle]

I have a dual 5508 controller /NCS deployment.

I deployed my first clean air AP today, a 3502I.

The Clean Air feature does not seem to work, however.

NCS tells me:

"No information is available because CleanAir is disabled or otherwise not available for this radio. If no information is available and CleanAir is enabled then you can try rebooting the AP XXXX"

The thing is that CleanAir is enabled on this AP.

Why does this nifty new feature not work?

Thanks,

Phill

[Saravanan Lakshmanan]

By default cleanair is disabled, we've to manually enable it.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10315/products_tech_note09186a0080b4bdc1.shtml#install1

Cisco CleanAir - Cisco Unified Wireless Network Design Guide

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10315/products_tech_note09186a0080b4bdc1.shtml

[phillip.vansickle]

OK, I dug a bit deeper...

It appears that I have to have it enabled per RF band on the controller itself, not just on the AP.

Will enabling this feature affect the connectivity of my wireless clients?

Thanks,

Phill

[Saravanan Lakshmanan]

By default, Global Clean air option per radio network is disabled and clean air option per AP is enabled.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/controller/7.0/configuration/guide/c70cleanair.pdf

No, performance is not negatively impacted on client.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10315/products_tech_note09186a0080b4bdc1.shtml#ca2

Local Mode AP (recommended) (LMAP)—A Cisco CleanAir AP operating in LMAP mode is serving clients on it’s assigned channel. It is also       monitoring the Spectrum on that channel and that channel ONLY. Tight silicon integration with the Wi-Fi radio allows the CleanAir hardware to listen between traffic on the channel that is currently being served with absolutely no penalty to throughput of attached clients. That is line rate detection without  interrupting client traffic.

There are no CleanAir dwells processed during normal off channel scans.In normal operation, a CUWN Local Mode AP executes an off channel passive scans of the alternate available channels in 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Off channel scans are used for system maintenance such as RRM metrics and rogue detection. The frequency of these scans is not sufficient to collect back to back dwells required for positive device classification, so information gleaned during this scan is suppressed by the system. Increasing the frequency of off channel scans is also not desirable, as it takes away from time that the radio services traffic.