Testing wireless access points

[jyoung]

I have been deploying Cisco (as well as Aruba and HP) wireless in the enterprise/education for some time.  One of the selling points of the Cisco model IMHO is the ability to do agressive load balancing.  I have been asked to test a smaller venders enterprise wireless solution.  I have sat in a few calls/presentations with engineers from this vendor and they do not have any answer to how they do load balancing (other than it just works).  What are your opinions on the importance of load balancing especially in dense environments (education).  Do you recommend any applications or ideas to test how the AP's will work in a dense environement (I will be doing some stress/throughput testing but I'm thinking of how I could emulate 25+ clients hitting one AP)?  Do any of you wifi-heads have any opinion or experience with enterprise wireless solutions from any of the smaller vendors?

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated and will be rated.

Thanks.

[Scott Fella]

Here is my take on it. I have been deploying high density wireless in education for a while. Client load balancing send out a status code 17. The issue is that devices that do not support status code 17 fails to associate to the access point. My first experience with that issue was with Apple devices, then some Dell laptops and HP laptops. So in my opinion, I don't enable that feature due to the impact it has. Does it make a big difference... from my experience in education not really. In a dense environment you will have devices join other AP's around the area, but you might see more client associations on a given AP. If you design for high density I think you would be fine. I don't have any experience with other vendor wireless as much as I do with Cisco so I really can't compare.

We use Veriwave to test high dense user.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6366/products_tech_note09186a00809c2fc3.shtml

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App