Aruba Networks White Paper Sample

Performance in the IT world is measured in terms of the volume of data transferred in a specified time, and the benchmark has inexorably risen every year as a result of advancing standards and innovations. In the field of enterprise Wi-Fi networking, that benchmark has now reached the point where wireless LAN (WLAN) performance exceeds that of a 100BaseT wired LAN. As a consequence, WLANs now have the capacity to supplant wired ports as the primary form of network access for many enterprise users.The second key metric is the throughput of individual data connections or sessions. WLAN users depend on a network that is ‘fast’ or ‘responsive’, and their expectations are set by the performance previously experienced on wired LANs.

Two measures of data capacity are critical to the network manager: total network data capacity and each user’s data throughput. The total network data capacity is the upper limit on the instantaneous sum of all individual connection rates, and measures how well the network as a whole is performing. For WLANs, in particular, it is especially important to maximize total data capacity across the network, since commonly observed impairments to radio transmission can unintentionally result in sub-optimal solutions. Total network data capacity can be especially difficult to measure accurately or repeatably in many networks, but that does not diminish its importance.