Cisco 300-425 - Designing Cisco Enterprise Wireless Networks (ENWLSD)

The Voice Readiness tool within Cisco Prime Infrastructure is designed to assess the wireless network’s ability to support voice services, including VoIP. It evaluates various factors such as signal strength, noise levels, and coverage to ensure that the wireless network can handle the quality of service requirements needed for voice communications.

 For a pre-deployment site survey, it’s important to know the AP model to understand the capabilities and coverage pattern of the APs. Additionally, knowing the number of clients helps to design a network that can handle the expected client density.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/wireless/5500-series-wireless-controllers/116057-site-survey-guidelines-wlan-00.html

To support a high density of mobile devices and bond channels in groups of two, the channel width for 802.11a should be set to 40 MHz. Setting the data rates to 24 MB and Mandatory ensures that only APs can send 802.11 management frames at this rate, which helps in managing the airtime fairness. References: CCNP Enterprise Wireless Design ENWLSD 300-425 and Implementation ENWLSI 300-430 Official Cert Guide.

To connect multiple wired devices over a workgroup bridge using an autonomous AP, a router is needed to manage the IP addresses and route traffic between the wired devices and the wireless network. The router will act as a gateway for the wired devices, allowing them to communicate with the WLAN. References: Cisco autonomous AP configuration guides and workgroup bridge deployment scenarios.

The IEEE 802.11k protocol is designed to enable radio resource measurement and neighbor list radio management packets. This protocol allows wireless devices to better understand their radio environment, which in turn supports real-time applications over wireless by enabling devices to make quicker and more informed decisions about roaming

 To ensure that the most critical APs at remote sites remain functional in the event of a failure, the Global AP Failover Priority feature can be used. By setting the priority of the most important APs to “critical”, these APs will be given precedence over others during a failover scenario. This allows the engineer to prioritize which APs should remain online without impacting the main site’s APs, which are set to a “high” priority.

The ‘eping’ command is used on Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers to verify that the redundancy peer in a Stateful Switchover (SSO) pair of controllers is up and connected. This command sends ECHO packets to the peer controller to ensure connectivity.

To minimize channel utilization and interference with existing tenant networks, it’s best to use the UNII-1 channels, which are typically less congested, and stick to 20-MHz channels to provide more non-overlapping channels and reduce co-channel interference.

For mobility tunnels to come up between WLCs, they need to be part of the same mobility group. If they are configured with different mobility groups, the mobility tunnels will not establish, preventing the WLCs from sharing client, AP, and security information.

Typically, a Cisco workgroup bridge can support up to 20 wired client connections. This allows for a reasonable number of devices to be connected while maintaining performance.