Outdoor Wireless Mesh redundancy instability

[aji.chandrasekharan]

Deploying a wireless mesh with cisco 1552S , out of 25 Aps 3 are configured as RAPS , Deployment is fairly dense deployment. Raps are being connected to the controller through two levels of switches. Raps are configured as RAPs hence its primary datapath is through wired network.

During a redundancy test connection to one of the RAP is disconnected from its second level switch , which means the path to the controller is broken but the link on the AP is up. This RAP finds a wireless backhaul to another AP and the network is re-converged and  stable for few minutes (10 Mins ) but after that it drops wireless mesh backhaul and tries to re-converge again , this process goes on and network is not stable.

can anyone help on the behavior if the data path through wired network fails and what is the behavior of the AP if the wired connected link on the AP fails ?

[mohanak]

If the Ethernet port is DOWN on a RAP, or a RAP fails to connect to a controller on a UP Ethernet port, the 802.11a/n radio is set as the primary backhaul for 15 minutes. Failing to find a neighbor or failing to connect to a controller via any neighbor on the 802.11a/n radio causes the primary backhaul to go into the scan state. The primary backhaul begins its scan with the Ethernet port.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/technology/mesh/7-4/design/guide/mesh74/mesh74_chapter_0101.html#ID4884

[aji.chandrasekharan]

In our case , the RAP finds a stable backhaul link as we have a dense deployment. Does it stay on the backhaul link always or does it tries back on its primary link (wired ) after sometime ? and during when it is trying to find the primary link ( Scanning time )  does it break the wireless backhaul which may cause re-convergence of the network ?

[aji.chandrasekharan]

Does it behave differently when the wired link on the AP is down and when the wired link is up and only path to the controller is lost , which means something in the middle is broken ?