Workgroup Bridge best practice

[Ajit Pai]

Hello community,

I'm looking for people willing to share their experience regarding the use of access points in workgroup bridge mode in the industrial world.

Before explaining my doubts with a series of targeted questions, I make a premise, the initial situation is pretty simple and is the following:

• on the wireless infrastructure side we have a WLC 2504 and ap 1800, the ssid has WPA-WPA2 / PSK authentication
• on the automatic machines side we have ap 1600 in workgroup bridge mode to which 3 or 4 clients are connected via cable through a small industrial switch
• the automatic machines send the warehouse data to an off-subnet server reachable through the core switch and the firewall

Given the initial situation I ask you:

1. Are there any technical specifications to be respected on the switch that separates the wgb and the cable clients? Is a HUB ok too? The Cisco documentation does not specify a particular configuration on the switch.
2. What is the best way to manage the "sleepy clients" that is the clients that do not make traffic on the network until they are interrogated. The WGB table doesn't fill up correctly if clients don't start generating traffic, right?

Based on the progress of the post I can be more specific on the problem.

Thank you.

[Rasika Nayanajith · Accepted solution]

Here is a good document I can reference if you like to optimize WGB for roaming.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/wireless/aironet-1130-ag-series/113198-wgb-roam-config.html 

Regarding question 1, if you think of having multiple vlan behind WGB, have a managed switch.

For question 2,  there is CLI command to help with sleeping client, have a look this post.

https://mrncciew.com/2013/06/16/unified-ap-wgb-with-multiple-vlan/

HTH

Rasika

*** Pls rate all useful responses ***