please help me to understand what is the meaning of Acess point Channel utilization?

[livelyankit]

   please help me to understand what is the meaning of Acess point Channel utilization? If i want to mange the capacity of my Office Wi-Fi network what are the factor i need to monitor. as per my understanding we need to monitor no of users connected to AP and channel utilization of AP. Pls advice

[Leo Laohoo]

Duplicate posts.

[aqjaved]

Throughput  is sometimes normalized and measured in percentage, but normalization  may cause confusion regarding what the percentage is related to. Channel  utilization, Channel efficiency and packet drop rate in percentage are less ambiguous terms.

The  channel efficiency, also known as bandwidth utilization  efficiency, in percentage is the achieved throughput related to the net bitrate in bit/s of a digital communication  channel. For example, if the throughput  is 70 Mbit/s in a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection, the channel efficiency  is 70%. In this example, effective 70Mbits of data are transmitted  every second.

Channel  utilization is instead a term related to the use of the channel  disregarding the throughput. It counts not only with the data bits but  also with the overhead that makes use of the channel. The transmission  overhead consists of preamble sequences, frame headers and acknowledge  packets. The definitions assume a noiseless channel. Otherwise, the  throughput would not be only associated to the nature (efficiency) of  the protocol but also to retransmissions resultant from quality of the  channel. In a simplistic approach, channel efficiency can be equal to  channel utilization assuming that acknowledge packets are zero-length  and that the communications provider will not see any bandwidth relative  to retransmissions or headers. Therefore, certain texts mark a  difference between channel utilization and protocol efficiency.

Factors:

Five Ways to Boost Wireless  Coverage in Your Office Please check the below link for step by step  configuration:

http://blogs.cisco.com/smallbusiness/five-ways-to-boost-wireless-coverage-in-your-office/

[Abhishek Abhishek]

Channel Utilization (%)—The percentage of time that an access point channel is busy operating on packets. The percentage (0 to 100%) represents a load from 0 to 1

[George Stefanick]

Channel Utilization is based around how busy a station (ap or client) sits in the busy state due to network traffic tranmissions on the channel or noise that is on the channel.

Not a sepcific AP or how busy it is sending packets.

Real world example --

A client wants to TX a frame. It senses layer 1 (NAV) and layer 2 (duration ID). If the medium is busy it will back off and wait a predetermined amount  (DIFS,SIFS, etc) of time based around QoS queuing. During this backoff, the AP calculates how much time its sitting in the busy state. This is an easy example of what channel util is.

Frames and noise are a factor. On cisco phones it is rated from 0 - 255 .  Note the the comments about

physical or virtual carrier sense (CS) mechanism. This is the layer 1 / 2 I mentioned.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cuipph/7925g/7_0/english/administration/guide/7925cfgu.html

Channel Utilization

The percentage of time, normalized to 255, in which the AP sensed the medium was busy, as indicated by the physical or virtual carrier sense (CS) mechanism.

Aps are 0 - 100% ..

hope this helps .. Please support the rating system

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