WESM zl Management and Configuration Guide WT.01.28 and greater

3-43
Radio Port Configuration
Quality of Service (QoS) on RP Radios
■ the antenna type
The RP 210’s and RP 230’s internal radios use omnidirectional diversity anten-
nas, which send out the signal in all directions equally. The two antennas of the
diversity antenna ensure even coverage over the area.
You can install a variety of external antennas on the RP220. These antennas can
be diversity or non-diversity. They can be omnidirectional, providing a sphere
of coverage like that of the RP 210 and 220 antennas, or directional, providing
a cone of coverage directed toward a specific area.
See “Setting the Antenna Mode” on page 3-18 for more information on this
setting.
■ the supported data rates
An RP radio supports the highest data rates only at close proximity. If you want
your wireless network to provide faster connections, then you must lower RP
radios’ power levels and space the RPs more closely together.
For more information on configuring data rate settings and power levels, see
“Configuring Rate Settings” on page 3-14 and “Setting the Desired Radio
Power” on page 3-14.
At the Data Link Layer, roaming can be slowed when the station must authenticate
to the network. Roaming to an RP supported by a different Wireless Edge Services
zl Module introduces the Network Layer: if the second module does not place the
station’s traffic on the same subnetwork that the first module did, the station’s IP
address is no longer valid. A Layer 3 roaming solution is necessary to solve this
problem. See Chapter 9: “Fast Layer 2 Roaming and Layer 3 Mobility” for more
information on enabling fast and seamless roaming throughout your wireless net-
work.
Quality of Service (QoS) on RP Radios
All traffic on a radio shares the same medium. So an RP radio may queue traffic for
multiple WLANs together. By default, RPs queue traffic according to the classifica-
tion of the WLAN to which it belongs. Because, by default, this classification is
normal for all WLANs, all traffic receives the same handling. That is, each frame
must contend for the medium on equal footing.
One way to configure RPs to prioritize transmitted traffic is to assign different
classifications to traffic in different WLANs. See “Manually Classifying a WLAN’s
Traffic” on page 4-108 of Chapter 4: “Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs).”