Enabling Broadcast between wireless clients on Guest Network

[trpatters]

I work at a Healthcare facility and our in the process of helping with the implementation of a new patient monitoring network from GE.  The monitoring equipment runs on a flat L2 network that is isolated from our campus network.  They have some wireless devices that need to run on this network and have to communicate with other devices on the network.  We have set up a controller to act as a "Guest Controller" just like a normal Guest setup to allow the devices to communicate on the L2 network using our campus wireless.  All devices can communicate with each other using unicast.  The problem that we are seeing is that they cannot communicate with each using broadcast. 

So my question is is it possible for clients on this quest network to communicate with each other via broadcast.  We are using a 5500 controller and WiSM blades to accomplish this.

Thanks,

Troy Patterson

[Stephen Rodriguez]

yes, this is possilbe.  IIRC on the Controller tab there is an option there for Broadcast Forwarding, make sure this is set to enable.  Or config network broadcast enable

Steve

[trpatters]

Steve we have done this.  This function works for wireless networks that are not tunneled to the Guest network.  We have captured packets at the Guest controller and we can see that the broadcast arrive at the controller in a encapsulated ethernet over ip frame.  You see them leave the guest controller as non encapsulated frames on the L2 network but they never are sent back to the other controllers encapsulated to the guest wireless.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Troy Patterson

[George Stefanick]

Yuk...

I know what product you are talking about.

We told GE to come back to us when they did L3. They just recently upgraded from WEP to PSK. That product is way dated...

I spoke to two other systems that have the GE devices and they did LARGE layer 2 domains. One even did a ssid just for these devices.

As for the anchor. You are dumpping the traffic to the anchor. I know the anchor doesnt pass broad/multicast, thats a limiation. I know the below is a little dated, but I dont think its changed ..

Q. I have a guest tunneling,  Ethernet over IP (EoIP) tunnel, configured between my 4400 Wireless LAN  Controller (WLC), which acts as the anchor WLC, and several remote WLCs.  Can this anchor WLC forward subnet broadcasts through the EoIP tunnel  fr...

A. No, the WLC 4400 does not forward IP subnet broadcasts from  the wired side to the wireless clients across the EoIP tunnel. This is  not a supported feature. Cisco does not support tunneling of subnet  broadcast or multicast in guest access topolo...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6366/products_qanda_item09186a00808b4c61.shtml