Aruba - Mobility Controller

AP groups in the Mobility Controller solution are used to group wireless access points that share common configuration or environmental characteristics. These include aspects such as radio settings that will be inherited by all APs that are joined to that group. They are also a useful mechanism to group APs in the same general area of a venue. The screenshot below shows a summary of AP groups on a test controller. Notice that they are accessed via the “Configuration > AP Groups” option on the left menu panel. Each AP group may contain one or more APs that will share common configuration parameters and/or venue areas. In the example below, the AP group “Conf_Suite1_Rm1_APs” is highlighted. It has one AP in the group, whose name can be seen in the lower panel : “CS1_RM1_AP1”. In a real world deployment, there will likely be many AP groups that represent different parts of the venue, together with several APs per group.

From an administrative perspective when considering Conference Tool, it makes sense to create an AP group for each discrete area in the venue where a conference may take place. This could be an individual meeting or conference room, or could perhaps be a whole conference hall. This allows a great deal of granularity and flexibility when assigning conference wireless networks to specific areas. A conference network could be created to be available in just one meeting room, or if several areas are selected, the same conference network could be created to appear in several meeting rooms and/or conference halls.

The sample screenshot below shows part of the configuration form for an AP group on the Mobility Controller. It shows the options available for the radio channels that may be used by APs in this group, together with the power levels used. These settings are beyond the scope of the configuration performed by conference tool and must be correctly configured during the initial deployment of the wireless network. When conference tool is used to deploy a network, it will make minor changes to the AP group configuration to add the new conference SSID into the “WLANs” tab shown in the screenshot below.

The diagram below is provided to clarify the relationship between SSIDs and AP groups in the Mobility Controller configuration.

It also shows which SSIDs are available in each location based on the configuration details shown, together with the logical network connectivity for customer traffic. In the configuration shown below, Conference Tool has been used to create a custom SSID called “Corp_Event_Conference” in the location “Conf_Suite_1_RM1_APs” . The SSID is assigned to VLAN 20 when it is created by Conference Tool.

An existing site-wide SSID called “Guest” already exists at the venue and is assigned to VLAN 10.

The configuration mappings attempt to show how SSID connectivity flows through the AP group to make it available in the required venue area. At the AP end of things, the connectivity on to the VLAN dedicated to each SSID is also shown. Note that although all VLANs are shown trunked to all APs (as would be the case in the real world), only the VLANs appropriate to the SSIDs on each AP are used to carry traffic when a conference network is in place.