We benchmarked a Cisco 1142 and an Aruba AP125 (both controller based) a while back. They had basically identical performance, although they did vary a bit depending on how many concurrent traffic streams you had, how many clients you had, whether traffic was uni- or bi-directional etc. One vendor was better at one thing, the other at another, but neither did clearly better or worse at the end.
Obviously, you run into issues such as being able to utilize both 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands to spread the load, possible interference from within or outside of the room, client capabilities etc. If the client doesn't have enough chains, there's not much you can do on the AP end to change that. One big tweak is to kill all the slower legacy protocols and transmit rates if you can, and minimize any multicast / broadcast traffic making it onto the air. Also, if you can deploy multiple APs to further reduce the number of clients per AP / channel, the more bandwidth you have per client. Also, considering you're within a room, you probably do not want to be running full power, so even 15.4W of PoE ought to allow for all chains to operate with both vendors, but you might want to confirm that. -- Toivo Voll University of South Florida Information Technology Communications -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:wireless-...@listserv.educause.edu] On Behalf Of Tom Lowry Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2010 2:41 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] 802.11n AP recommendations We have a robotics research group that wants the highest-speed wireless connections possible. All the equipment is in the same room -- approximately 50'x 50'. Many consumer grade 802.11n APs seem to top out at well below 100Mbps. If anyone can recommend equipment that can achieve higher throughput, please let me know. I won't say price is no object, but we need to consider the options. Thanks, Tom Lowry Department of Computer Science University of Arizona ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
