Juniper wlan highdensity_webinar

MISSION CRITICAL WLAN IN
HIGH DENSITY ENVIRONMENTS

INTRODUCTION
Lane Timmons Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Joe Bilbro Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Phil Belanger Novarum
Ken Biba Novarum
Tim McCarthy Juniper Networks

AGENDA
1. Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
 High Density Problems and Solutions
2. Juniper High Density BYOD Testing with Novarum
 Test event in Sunnyvale, CA
 Test Results and Observations
3. Key Takeaways

TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY
HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER
Major American research university
 Founded 1969, West Texas
 Over 10,000 users with multiple devices
 4,000 students, 6,000 faculty and staff
Challenge
 Students unhappy with wireless access
 Legacy 802.11bg WLAN network
 Need 802.11n WLAN to support high density requirements
 Students connect 2-4 laptops, tablets, smartphones
Key need: high density
 High quality wireless service in dense university environments

Result: Juniper delivered the best end user experience
LIVE VENDOR EVALUATION
Setup – high density client environment
 Vendors configured/calibrated system prior to test
 200 students invited to participate in evaluations during lunch hour
 Typical large classroom setting
 Each student ran tests with 2-4 wireless devices
 Multiple tests performed: web, youtube video, news site/data, HD
streaming video
Evaluation
 Qualitative assessment of end-user experience for each data type:
good, average, bad
 Final question comparing experience to home network

NEXT STEPS
Juniper selected for new high density 11n network
Partnered with Juniper, designed for high density locations
Initial rollout 1300 APs, completed 2013
Continuing to deploy additional APs to service high density area

5
3
4
2
1
POLL QUESTION #1
The highest amount of users at one location that my
organization regularly provides Wireless LAN services to is:
10-20
20-50
50-100
100-250
250+

WHY TEST HIGH DENSITY
BYOD trend is driving increased density
Device diversity and high density is the new reality
Customer deployments are getting bigger and becoming
mission critical
Be confident your WLAN vendor understands High Density

CHALLENGES
How to narrow the test scope to something meaningful
No test scenario is perfect, how to get as close as possible
Testing Wi-Fi with real devices in real world settings is hard
RF is messy, how to get reproducible test results

High Density Wi-Fi
 High Density is the new normal
 Wireless is the edge network for enterprises
 Explosion of mobile devices
 BYOD
 Cellular offload
 WLANs are being pushed to their limits
 demand for wireless access is exploding
 technology is improving but spectrum is limited
 Core Wi-Fi technology is very mature
 Must design WLAN deployments for high density
 Subtle changes in system design can make large
differences in system performance
11
Copyright Novarum 2013

Testing Approach
 Test with real clients in a real environment
 Over the air testing
 Typical clients
 Repeatable tests
 Ixia Chariot scripts
 High Throughput TCP tests push system to limit
 Consistent configuration for WLAN infrastructure
 Same locations, channels and power levels
 Consistent configuration for clients
 Tools to observe system behavior
 Packet capture, spectrum analyzer
 Controller system logs, Chariot results
12

Important Metrics
 System performance is affected by subtle differences
in high density WLAN features and configuration
 Load Balancing and Band Steering
 How are clients distributed across the APs?
 Utilization
 What is channel utilization? Are all channels used effectively?
 Fairness
 Are all clients getting fair access to the system?
 Error Rate
 Retry Rate
 If retries become too high system can collapse.
 Client behavior
 Do laptops get better service than smartphones?
13

Test Setup
 Facility
 1000 seat auditorium in Sunnyvale, CA
 Clean RF environment
 Configured for 300 seats in theatre arrangement
 Client Devices
 300 real devices
 Mix of iDevices, PCs, Macs, Android, tablets
and smartphones
 Traffic generation tool installed on each device
 Network
 6 WLA532 3x3
3-stream 11n APs
 2 WLC880 controllers
 EX Virtual Chassis
 SRX Cluster
14 Copyright Novarum 2013

Client Configurations
 A variety of clients - smartphones, laptops, tablets
 Three different client populations - All, Half, Third
 Auditorium style seating - row letter, seat number
 Each client machine is assigned a name and location that never changes,
same client in same seat
 Evenly distributed throughout the space
15
Channel Configuration

Overall Results
 Maximum aggregate
throughput was 483 MBPs
for this configuration
 We saw throughput over
625 Mbps when using more
5 GHz channels
 For the tests generating the
highest load, “BiDir” and
“Max Thruput”, peak
system capacity with half
client load
 Throughput declined
with All Clients
 Gradual decline
 Stable system performance
at the highest load
16
#
Clients
BiDir
Thruput
Max
Thruput
Low
Thruput
All 302 423 433 311
Half 156 479 483 312
Third 95 454 442 231

Detailed Results
Max Throughput, Half Clients
 Chariot throughput results
 Each line is throughput
results for a TCP stream
 156 clients with 221
separate streams in this test
 Low error rate
 Most streams under
4 Mbps
 Throughput fairly even
across all of the
clients/streams
17

Detailed Results
Max Throughput, Half Clients
 Channelyzer screen
captures show channel usage
 All 5 GHz channels
are being used
 Channel 165 is shared
by 2 APs and is only 20 MHz
 Band steering worked well
 2.4 GHz channels were almost
fully utilized in all of the tests
 Channel 44+ had higher utilization
 also had higher retry rate...
18

Overall Observations
 Error rate rises with increasing
client load as expected
 Retry rate remains fairly flat with
increasing client load
 This is surprising and positive
 System is stable under very high load
 Some clients have higher retry rates
 Win7 and Win8 had very high retry
rates on most tests
 Mobile clients
surprisingly good
19

3
4
2
1
POLL QUESTION #2
The performance of my current wireless network is:
Excellent
Average
Adequate
Poor

JUNIPER HIGH DENSITY TEST TRIVIA
302 clients
1.5 days to setup
3 days of testing
.5 day to tear down
~30 perf tests per vendor, 3
vendors, over 100 test runs
Typical 30sec packet
capture of one 5Ghz
channel = ~500,000 packets
12GB of compressed log
files, packet captures,
script output

WHAT WE LEARNED
Clients in high density environments, under the most demanding
load, can still access the Juniper network to get their work done
Major network failures did not cause any disruption to the
WLAN network
Many factors influence High Density design
(see whitepaper for more info)

HOW HIGH DENSITY DESIGN CAN AFFECT THE
BOTTOM LINE
Lower Capex
 Proven to meet BYOD demands of today and tomorrow
 No need to purchase and deploy more APs as client population
increases
Lower Opex
 Fewer system failures
 Fewer client trouble calls
 Fewer devices to manage
 Higher utilization of network resources
 Increased productivity of IT

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR WLAN VENDOR
Do you test WLAN at high densities with BYOD devices?
Can your system continue operation in the event of major
network failures?
If so, what is the recovery time?
Is performance for all clients on the system maintained as
density increases?

KEY TAKEAWAYS
BYOD is driving new levels of scale in all customer
networks of all sizes
Testing at this level is a requirement for the new network
Testing at full capacity proves system readiness to support
high performance for High Density networks
Resiliency at scale is critical for delivering High Density
WLAN networks
Customers should consider doing their own “taste tests”
like Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
5
3
4
2
1

3
4
2
1
POLL QUESTION #3
My workforce is:
Highly mobile
Somewhat mobile
Mostly fixed
Not mobile/wireless

Juniper wlan highdensity_webinar

Juniper wlan highdensity_webinar

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