Introduction
What is wireless packet concatenation?
Resolution
Wireless packet concatenation is the concatenation of smaller packets into larger ones to more efficiently use the wireless medium and provide higher overall data throughputs on a wireless bridge.
The wireless concatenation feature might not be supported on all products. For example, the 1310 series bridge supports concatenation but the 1200 series access point does not. To prevent connectivity problems, always ensure your wireless LAN products support wireless concatenation before attempting to implement the feature.
Determine if you want to enable the radio MAC to concatenate individual packets into one single transmit packet. If you enable this parameter, you need to configure the radio to do packet concatenation during transmission and both primary and secondary bridges have to be configured to use packet concatenation.
Configuring Packet Concatenation
If your bridge often transmits bursts of data, such as voice packets, you can enable packet concatenation to improve throughput. Concatenation is enabled by default to improve throughput.
Not all devices connected through the bridge from the Ethernet LAN can support packet concatenation, such as third party wireless clients connected to access points. Prior to configuring the packet concatenation feature, ensure all your network devices support packet concatenation. Also ensure that all bridges are running Cisco IOS Release 12.2(11)JA or later. If connectivity problems develop after implementing packet concatenation, deactivate the concatenation feature to determine if that is the cause of the problem.
Beginning in privileged EXEC mode, follow these steps to configure packet concatenation:
Command
Purpose
Step 1 | configure terminal | Enter global configuration mode. |
Step 2 | interface dot11radio 0 | Enter interface configuration mode for the radio interface. |
Step 3 | concatenation [ sizebytes ] | Enable packet concatenation. (Optional) Set a maximum size for concatenated packets in bytes. Enter a value from 1600 to 4000. When concatenation is enabled, the default packet size is 3500. |
Step 4 | end | Return to privileged EXEC mode. |
Step 5 | copy running-config startup-config | (Optional) Save your entries in the configuration file. |
Use the no form of the command to disable packet concatenation.
Problem Type
Definitions
Products
Access point
Reference
New Features: Cisco IOS Release 12.2(11)JA
Release Notes for Cisco Aironet 1410 Bridges for Cisco IOS Release 12.2(11)JA
Online Help for Cisco IOS Release 12.2(15)JA
