Cisco Systems 3.2 manual Overview of Radio Resource Management, Radio Resource Monitoring

Chapter 9 Configuring Radio Resource Management

Overview of Radio Resource Management

Overview of Radio Resource Management

The radio resource management (RRM) software embedded in the controller acts as a built-in RF engineer to consistently provide real-time RF management of your wireless network. RRM enables controllers to continually monitor their associated lightweight access points for the following information:

•Traffic load—The total bandwidth used for transmitting and receiving traffic. It enables wireless LAN managers to track and plan network growth ahead of client demand.

•Interference—The amount of traffic coming from other 802.11 sources.

•Noise—The amount of non-802.11 traffic that is interfering with the currently assigned channel.

•Coverage—The received signal strength (RSSI) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for all connected clients.

•Other access points—The number of nearby access points.

Using this information, RRM can periodically reconfigure the 802.11 RF network for best efficiency. To do this, RRM performs these functions:

•Radio resource monitoring

•Dynamic channel assignment

•Dynamic transmit power control

•Coverage hole detection and correction

•Client and network load balancing

Radio Resource Monitoring

RRM automatically detects and configures new controllers and lightweight access points as they are added to the network. It then automatically adjusts associated and nearby lightweight access points to optimize coverage and capacity.

Lightweight access points can simultaneously scan all valid 802.11a/b/g channels for the country of operation as well as for channels available in other locations. The access point goes “off-channel” for a period not greater than 60 ms to monitor these channels for noise and interference. Packets collected during this time are analyzed to detect rogue access points, rogue clients, ad-hoc clients, and interfering access points.

Note If packets have been in the voice queue in the last 100 ms, the access point does not go off-channel.

By default, each access point spends only 0.2 percent of its time off-channel. This activity is distributed across all access points so that adjacent access points are not scanning at the same time, which could adversely affect wireless LAN performance. In this way, administrators gain the perspective of every access point, thereby increasing network visibility.

Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Configuration Guide

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