WLAN Performance

[janesh_abey]

Hi Team,

Could some please let me know whether there is a  tool that could be utilized to put a WLAN under stress to identify its breaking point?

Specifically on

H-REAP APs and impact on the northbound switch, router performances and WAN link utilization.

Requesting  20-30 people to hammer the WLAN with their laptops  is another option  but it is not feasible at this stage

Thanks in advance.

cheers,

Janesh

[Scott Fella]

You would do testing as you would do on the wired side.  I don't know how you will see a breaking point... wireless is half duplex so the more traffic on that AP, the more others might see an issue.

[janesh_abey]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your reply.I was under the impression that there could be tools specifically to impact 802.11 side of things.

With wired, I use iperf but looking for  something  better than that

cheers,

Janesh

[Scott Fella · Accepted solution]

Well... there are tools like SolarWinds that has tools to "hammer" the network, but its not free.  If you have a throughput requirement, you can always upload large video via ftp, etc with multiple devices and see when it starts affecting your throughput requirements.  I've had 4 devices uploading large 4gb video and it took over 30 minutes on a 1252AP.  That was in the requirements of the client and that was fine.  Adding one more deivce to the wireless failed the requirement testing.  You can probably find tools out there, but not for free.  There are also hardware devices to test throughput, but they are not cheap.  Look at how much you are oversubscribing with AP and the switchport.  I think that you will have poor performance, before you can break it.

[janesh_abey]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for replying to my query.Really appreciate it.

Best regards,

Janesh

[George Stefanick]

Your breaking point will be the 802.11 medium, without question. As you add more and more devices your channel activity increases. So even if you have 1 device throwing the kitchen sink at your access point you really dont get the full impact. As mentioned you need to add the clients. Ive had the luck a few times recently to test phones and laptops on a large scale. I worked with our desktop folks who were imaging new devices for a refresh, I asked to borrow a number of them for a few hours. I also recently rolled out 500 phones and while staging them we took a few hours to play.

Have you seen the cisco client density video ?

http://www.my80211.com/cisco-wlan-videos/