450 AP Performance

Hi,

Can someone please tell me what are the best settings for the PMP450 AP and SM to get the maximum performance?

i understand that the deployment of the actual AP and SM play a big role but i just want to make sure i'm not missing something...

i'm running on software 13.1.2.

Paul

Hi Paul -

The first thing to do will be to upgrade to at least 13.2.1.   There were major performance improvements done in the software in 13.2, and 13.2.1 was a field bug fix release for 13.2.  Other things to make sure of are to set the max range properly based on the geographic footprint of the sector, as well as the contention slots.  The suggestion for contention slot settings varies based on sector size as well as type of traffic (whether downlink or uplink is more prevalent).

And, probably the biggest thing, which is not really a configuration thing, is to ensure proper planning in frequency (run Spectrum Analsysis to find the cleanest frequency to use), as well as the physicall location of the SMs.  If you can try to ensure that most or all of your SMs are able to get at least 6X modulation rate, that will be the biggest impact.  SMs that run in lower modulation rates affect the entire sector becuase it robs you of efficiency in the RF spectrum.  You can do this by adding external gain to the SMs via dishes or CLIP accessories.

Goodl uck!

Aaron, not to hijack but i've noticed customers showing as consistently 8X/6X but when you do a efficiency test with SNR, it shows that only around 1% of traffic is 256, i think out of our first 20 customers only 1 shows high usage of 256qam... If the customer is 8X consistently shouldnt they have a 256 usage?

Speaking from our experience with 450 I'd HIGHLY recommnend setting a RSSI and SNR level minimum and sticking to that. We quickly found that the combination of a particularly heavy user with low modulation results in a disproportiant hit to AP performance. In one recent situation we had a user using > 500 GB a month with a 78 dB 1x signal once we improved the RSSI to -68 at 6x we saw a significant boost to total AP throughput.

Tim

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Tim,

What you're seeing is something that everyone using wireless equipment should well understand.  It's actually a proportionate amount of capacity being lost...

Because that particular user is using a high percentage of the capacity in the sector, and he was at a lower modulation, it would drag down the overall capacity more than if he were using less of the data (due to the lower modulation, it takes longer for the data to get across that link, reducing the time the AP has to communicate with other devices in the sector).

To optimize the sector performance, make sure that the highest users of data are in the highest modulation mode possible.

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Just wanted to link this here: Throughput vs. Range

It's an explanation along the lines of this thread...

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