Dual WLAN links with load balancing and failover

[gnupoxial]

Hello,

I am in a scenario where I am in need of two WLAN links between two buildings. There is a distance of 100-150 meters and minimum bandwidth required for both links together is 300Mbit/s. The thing is that both links should use load balancing between them and if one of them goes down, the last one should act as fail over.

I have been looking at Cisco Aironet 1550 Series though I have no idea what is needed to get load balancing and fail over to work, so I am searching here for suggestions on what equipment is needed.

Something like this:

              ---------------WLAN Link 150-300Mbit/s-----------

Building                    Load balancing and fail over               Building

              ---------------WLAN Link 150-300Mbit/s-----------

Thanks in advance!

[Nicolas Darchis]

Several points.

When an AP is doing 300Mbps, that's NOT the real throughput you have. It's the data rate at which traffic is sent.

All in all, if your AP/client are doing 300MBps association, you will see max 150Mbps with a file transfer.

From there, I'm not even sure that 11n supports dual spatial streams over such long distances (you can't have multipath in open air) so afaik the 1550 only do 150Mbps association rate (=dual channel with one spatial stream). That means 75Mbps real speed.

I couldn't test a 1550 yet so don't take my word for official statement but that's what I'm thinking.

the wireless links will always be both up and they can be on different channels.

That will then mean that it will be "as if" the remote switch was connected directly to the central switch (where WLC is connected) as the WLC tunnels traffic all the way. So you could do a spanning-tree config on this one I guess to block the port onthe remote switch.

Regards,

Nicolas