Users Guide

Parameter Description
Band steering reduces co-channel interference and increases available bandwidth
for dual-band clients, because there are more channels on the 5GHz band than on
the 2.4GHz band. Dual-band 802.11n-capable clients may see even greater
bandwidth improvements, because the band steering feature will automatically
select between 40MHz or 20MHz channels in 802.11n networks. This feature is
disabled by default, and must be enabled in a Virtual AP profile.
The band steering feature supports both campus APs and remote APs that have a
virtual AP profile set to tunnel, split-tunnel or bridge forwarding mode. Note,
however, that if a campus or remote APs has virtual AP profiles configured in
bridge or split-tunnel forwarding mode but no virtual AP in tunnel mode, those APs
will gather information about 5G-capable clients independently and will not
exchange this information with other APs that also have bridge or split-tunnel
virtual APs only.
Steering Mode Band steering supports the following three different band steering modes.
l Force-5GHz: When the AP is configured in force-5GHz band steering mode,
the AP will try to force 5Ghz-capable APs to use that radio band.
l Prefer-5GHz (Default): If you configure the AP to use prefer-5GHz band
steering mode, the AP will try to steer the client to 5G band (if the client is 5G
capable) but will let the client connect on the 2.4G band if the client persists in
2.4G association attempts.
l Balance-bands: In this band steering mode, the AP tries to balance the clients
across the two radios in order to best utilize the available 2.4G bandwidth. This
feature takes into account the fact that the 5Ghz band has more channels than
the 2.4 Ghz band, and that the 5Ghz channels operate in 40MHz while the
2.5Ghz band operates in 20MHz.
Dynamic Multicast
Optimization (DMO)
Enable/Disable dynamic multicast optimization. This parameter is disabled by
default, and cannot be enabled without the PEFNG license.
Drop Broadcast and
Multicast
Select the Drop Broadcast and Multicast check box to filter out broadcast and
multicast traffic in the air.
Do not enable this option for virtual APs configured in bridge forwarding mode.
This configuration parameter is only intended for use for virtual APs in tunnel
mode. In tunnel mode, all packets travel to the controller, so the controller is able
to drop all broadcast traffic. When a virtual AP is configured to use bridge
forwarding mode, most data traffic stays local to the AP, and the controller is not
able to filter out that broadcast traffic.
IMPORTANT: If you enable this option, you must also enable the Broadcast-Filter
ARP parameter on the virtual AP profile to prevent ARP requests from being
dropped. You can enable this parameter by checking the Convert Broadcast ARP
requests to unicast check box as described in the following parameter
description.
Convert Broadcast
ARP requests to
unicast
If enabled, all broadcast ARP requests are converted to unicast and sent directly to
the client. You can check the status of this option using the show ap active and
the show datapath tunnel command. If enabled, the output will display the letter
a in the flags column.
This configuration parameter is only intended for use for virtual APs in tunnel
mode. In tunnel mode, all packets travel to the controller, so the controller is able
to convert ARP requests directed to the broadcast address into unicast.
Table 90: Virtual AP Profile Parameters
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