Cisco Prime Infrastructure Channel utilisation question

[codflanglers]

When I open Monitor - Site Maps - <building map> you can select a number of options on the left hand side for Access Points.

I have selected utilisation as I wanted to see which APs were being used heavily on the b/g/n radio.

Now what I'm seeing in some cases is RX=0 TX=0 Ch=94%, so is this the channel that's 94% used? I'm assuming it is.My understanding is that the channel utilisation being so high will cause traffic to buffer and queue...is that right?

What can I do about it? It's a high density area with plenty of APs (I've even switched off the b/g/n radios on some of these to help) with a lot of users and transient through traffic.

[Scott Fella]

It's seems that way, not really knowing how your APs are positioned and how many makes it hard to determine what to do. All I can say is maybe run your show run-config thought the config analyzer and see what that shows you too.

You might have to adjust your data rates and power. Here is a high density guide that has suggestions you might try.

http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/cisco_wlan_design_guide.pdf

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[codflanglers]

If it helps, they're all Cisco APs...a mix of 1252s, 3502s. They are all lightweight and I'm letting Cisco RRM handle power and channel assignment.

I'll take a look at the link, thanks.

[Scott Fella]

In high density and depending on how many APs and their location, you still need to tweak RRM. RRM of course will help, but not 100% of the time. So you have a mix of CleanAir and non CleanAir, so that tells me that you can't have CleanAir enabled... best practice. If you have your data rates at default, that is another issue. If your DCA is default at 10 minutes, your channels might be converging too much and that cause clients to drop. These are some of the thing that I have ran into in high density deployments and have had to tweak along with other stuff.

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[codflanglers]

I was going to start manually assigning channels and power in that area to try and help.

Also, I'll switch off clean air on those 3502s in that area. See if that helps.

[Scott Fella]

Just disable EDRRM and CleanAir. You can still enable Report Interferers and Persistent Device Propagation.

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[Eric Lindsey]

For what it is worth we recently had this same issue with a few of our 3502 access points. We removed the AP that was running at 90% and put in a new one on the same channel and the same power settings. The new one is running fine. We worked with Cisco and RMA'ed the access point. I can't say that is your problem too. But in our case it was a bad radio.

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