CAPWAP bandwidth usage

[Mike Clites]

Can anyone tell me how much bandwidth

CAPWAP requires per WAP-3502 across

the WAN to a WLC-5508 ?

I am using a wan analyzer and it appears that each of my WAP is consuming roughly 30kbs of WAN bandwidth back to the WLC at my location.

That seems a bit high to me considering it is a backbone/infrastructure protocol and not actually carrying user requested data (all my WAP are in local switching mode).

If anyone can shed some light on this for me that would be great, thanks !

Mike

[Surendra BG]

Hi,

the below link may answer ur question!!

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk722/tk809/technologies_white_paper09186a0080901caa.shtml

Regards

Surendra

[Mike Clites]

Surendra,

thank you for your post & link.

That document is the closet I have seen that actually talks about bandwidth and control packets.

The document could be out of date though because it is talking about the LWAP which is the layer 2 control not really employed by the newer WAPs.

CAPWAP has replaced it and is a layer 3 control protocal.

From my own bandwidth monitoring using Scrutinizer, it appears CAPWAP uses 30kbps for control communications to the WLC.

Now IF you do NOT do local switching in H-Reap then the data payload is also encrypted and passed to the controller through the CAPWAP tunnel.

At least that is what I read in a document.

Since we are doing all local switching w/ HReap I cannot say if this is true or not.