I am hoping that those of you who are VLAN experts and who have successfully implemented VLAN in your Canopy modules will be able to help me address the following issue.
We have a full 5.7GHz 6-cluster Non-Advantage Canopy System. A customer approached us with the need to create a WAN to a bunch of different office locations that they have. Unfortunately, none of the locations were able to see our tower, but they were able to see a neighboring tower.
Due to the bandwidth and throughput demands of the customer, the network has to be made up of all point to point backhauls. All the the backhauls will aggregate at a CMM micro at our neighboring tower. Everything will be timed with GPS. All of the backhauls slaves at the customer locations will be terminated into Layer-2 switches.
They decided that they would like to add one more location. We did a site survey, and this final location is actually able to see our tower as well as the neighboring tower. This is where my questions begin.
Suppose from this final location we mount an SM and point it at our Access Point cluster, and mount an SM on the neighboring tower (where all the Backhaul Masters are) and also point and register it with our system. This way the final customer location is being passed through our system into the neighboring tower where the rest of the customers infrastructure is. The reason we wish to do this is for frequency reservation. Our system uses a total of four frequencies, 3 for the AP’s and one for our backhaul. The customer system would be using two 5.2GHz frequencies as well as one 5.7GHz frequency. This is why we would rather tie them into our system instead of adding an additional frequency.
My main concern is broadcast traffic that would be generated from the customer WAN/LAN that would be induced into our system if we decide to use the two SM’s to link the final location. We use our system mainly for customer internet access. I would hate to see ARP broadcast traffic reaching customer routers.
I began thinking about the VLAN feature of the new 6.1 firmware and how it could be used to prevent broadcast traffic from the customer WAN from being introduced into our internet access system. My questions are as follows:
1. Is it possible to use the VLAN feature in the 6.1 firmware to prevent the customer broadcast traffic from entering our system?
2. If so, what happens if the final customer location registers on a different AP than does the SM that is on the neighboring tower also registered to our system, in terms of the VLAN configuration. Does that mean that both APs being used to tie the customer location to the remote tower would have the same VLAN ID?
3. Would configuring VLANs only to prevent this broadcast traffic mess up the existing infrastructure and configurations for our existing internet access customers? Would our internet customers connected to the access points used to connect the final customer location need to be VLAN tagged as well in order to maintain connection to our APs?
4. Is any special VLAN enabled equipment required at the customer end to accomplish this besides SMs?
5. Any other more “simple” suggestions?
Thanks in advance.