Controllerless Networks

I work for a customer with a pretty sizable office on one specific floor of an office building. They don't own the building however, and on other floors there are many other tenants established. My customer runs their own Aruba IAP-305 cluster and we broadcast a corporate wifi SSID. All these other tenants in the building are also running their own wifi networks from a host of other vendors. 

The problem my customer runs into is that many people are complaining about the wifi performance or even being intermittently disconnected. I am no expert when it comes to wifi design and configuration, so the IAP-305 cluster is running on default settings. I have not made any changes to advanced settings. When I use some wifi analyzer software on my laptop I noticed that the building is absolutely jam packed with other wifi devices broadcasting. Pretty much all channels are as dense as can be.

Recently we expanded their IAP-305 cluster with a few extra accesspoints. Just so that users would be closer to our accesspoints and hopefully with that suffer a little less from all the interference in the building. This did improve somewhat, but there are still performance issues from time to time.

Could someone give me some suggestions about what I can do configuration wise on the IAP cluster to make it more suitable for such a dense environment with many different wireless devices all broadcasting at the same time? I did notice that I have 80MHz channels support enabled. Should I disable that and stick with 40MHz for less overlap? Any other things I can try?

Edit: At the moment it seems that only two users are complaining. Upon questioning them about the issues they explained that the network icon on their taskbar in Windows would intermittently go from connected to the wifi to not connected. They will get disconnected from their Citrix session and they can also briefly not open any webpages. They say it comes back after about 10 - 20 seconds. They say the wifi in general is slow, but that could also be their perception.

I came into the office at 6:00PM today to run a few tests. At this time the office was entirely empty, including all other tenant spaces in the building. Strangely enough I got near maximum speeds on both my cell phone and laptop in all areas of the office. The other wifi networks from other tenants in the building are still active. So the only real difference is that there are less people in the office connected to the wifi. No idea what that could be. I don't have any issues with other Aruba clusters at other customers.

HI Scryden,

you really need a decent WiFi analysis/planning tool. 

You should do an as-installed walk around, this will show you the coverage for the customers and all other WiFi networks that can be seen in the office.

Adding APs may make things worse in some cases, as the new AP could start to interfere with existing ones, so you need to know if there is actually a poor signal in some areas.

Dropping down from 80 to 40MHz is a good idea if you have a lot of users on the network.

It may also help the VC find  interference free channels.

You don't  mention if the problem is with 2.4 or 5GHz clients.

The Aruba gear is usually really good at avoiding interference and will change power and channel to give the best performance for your air space - using their ARM algorithm.

Look at the RF stats on the GUI and you should see a nice even spread of channels and power for all of the radios.

A couple of CLI commands to try are..

    show ap arm rf-summary ap-name our AP Name Here

    show ap arm history ap-name our AP Name Here

    show ap arm neighbors ap-name our AP Name Here

These commands will give you a better idea of how the RF side of things is looking. 

Cheers,

 Ewan.