Advantage/dis adv of Autonomous and WLAN controller solution

[satish Chowdary]

Hi All,

Can you send advantages and disadvantage of both autonomous and WLAN controller solutions.

Please send me the reference documents, if any.

Regards,

Satish.

[devils_advocate]

If you have a read on the Cisco website (or the many other websites) about the differences between the two, you should be able to come up with a list of advantages and disadvantages yourself.....

[Florin Barhala]

I think the obvious advantage when comes to WLC comes in numbers.

If you have couple APs you can live happy without any WLC, still as you grow more than 8-10APs and even more having several locations maybe, you will find that WLC is exactly what you need:

- centralized management

- easily to deploy APs, just power on and WLC will push the configuration

- many other advantages that come together with any centralized solution you have.

[Abha Jha]

The main difference is:-

Autonomous :- each AP has to be managed seperately

Controller based:- many AP can be managed by single controller no need to go to each AP and configure it seperatly.. all configuration done at once.. but once the controller is down all the AP's will be down at once attached to it.. which is not the case of autonomous AP.

[kaaftab]

Primary Different between them is

Advantages

      Centralize management

Disadvantage

  Manually management of each AP

For reference and advantage for WLC kindly see the following link

      http://netgear.de/images/Wireless_LAN_White_Paper22-17318.pdf

[Scott Fella]

I would never sell an autonomous solution!!!! :)

Here is a doc I found.

http://what-when-how.com/deploying-and-troubleshooting-cisco-wireless-lan-controllers/lightweight-compared-to-traditional-autonomous-aps-cisco-wireless-lan-controllers/

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[Abhishek Abhishek]

Developing a New Wireless LAN Centralization Protocol

To transport data and facilitate communication between lightweight access points and a wireless LAN controller, a new protocol was needed. This protocol needed to address the following requirements:

• Ease of deployment-Instead of trunking VLANs to the centralized controller(s), the protocol had to be able to cross subnet boundaries.

• Deployment security-Just because an access point is plugged into the network doesn't mean that it should have full access to the network. The protocol needed to provide a way of authenticating all access points connected to the network.

• Real-time control of the access point-Once the access point is deployed, authenticated, and connected to the controller, the protocol needed to provide real-time control of the access point for management and deployment of mobility services.

• Protocol extensibility-The protocol needed to work across a myriad of platforms, from chassis-based modules in large Ethernet switches, to stackables, to routers, and any other network elements.

• Transport extensibility-Although networks generally run over Ethernet, the protocol had to be capable of running across low-speed WAN links and even over the air (for applications like wireless mesh networking).

[Saurav Lodh]

all above explains enough why we get so many blogs discussing " autonomous AP convert to lightweight"