Load balancing using Cisco Aironet

[william.ong]

Hi, I would like to load balance a group of 50 wireless users with two AP in an office area. What are the conventional and effective ways that I can do to achieve that? Tks.

[a-vazquez]

You could put ½ the clients on 1 AP with its own frequency and the other ½ on the other. There’s no real way to do this automatically.

[f.williams]

The only way you can really controll this is by controlling the % on overlap betwen the two. So really at any given point you may have more 50 ppl on a single AP.Changing the Frq on the AP's will not provide load balancing it only simulate an isolated collision domain.

[dave.reid]

You can't control it directly, but there is a built-in procedure for load balancing. The best I can remember is that a switch won't take place unless the new access point being considered has four fewer users, 50% of the current signal strength and some limit to the data load. Something like that anyway.

[terry]

Where did you get the above information on four users and load balancing.

thanks terry

[dave.reid]

I'm not sure. I think I either heard at the wireless bootcamp road show or during the Oct31 online seminar.

[jeff]

If you are setting this up solely for access to the wired backbone, the easiest way to do this would be to set AP1 with SSID=12345, channel=1 and AP2 with SSID=67890, channel=11. Then set half of the wireless clients with SSID=12345 and half with SSID=67890. This way, each client would only be able to associate and authenticate to a particular AP. This will only work effectively if the office area is particularly open and free of obstacles. Now, realize that each client will only be able to communicate wirelessly with clients with the same SSID, so if wireless communication between clients is a necessity, you will have to look at other solutions.

[fjuch]

jeff@p3wireless.com Said: Now, realize that each client will only be able to communicate wirelessly with clients with the same SSID, so if wireless communication between clients is a necessity, you will have to look at other solutions.

This is not true! They would be able to talk to the other clients through the Wired LAN and the other AP. Ie: Client -> AP1 -> Wired LAN -> AP2 -> Client2.

[jeff]

What I meant to say was that this would restrict communications only through a certain access point and that communication between wireless clients with different SSID's would take place only through the wired segment. (Which is exactly what you said) It was about 4 am when I wrote this. Sorry for the confusion. ;-)

[bmcmurdo]

Load balancing is a Cisco feature that allows multiple APs (on non-overlapping channels) in the same coverage area to provide greater aggregate bandwidth and redundancy.

Any Aironet client will listen to beacons from all available APs and will load-balance itself across the available APs – based on;

· AP signal Strength

· Number of existing client associations

· AP transmitter Loading

· AP hops to the Ethernet backbone.

If any AP fails, the clients will redistribute themselves among the remaining APs.

[blue.modal]

Last time I was faced with this scenario (this summer) there were no drivers that did what you describe above (according to the local SE and TAC).

Where can I find such a miracle cure?

I had to manipulate signal strentgh from two APs across a large auditorium (basically make sure that each antenna, placed at the far sides of the room, could cover just over half the space - load balancing by where you sit.

The only option Cisco proposed was to cap the number of users per AP, which is not load balancing.