Wireless

Quality of Service (QoS), in general, is probably one of the most difficult topics to digest. Combing QoS with wireless makes it even more confusing. Without good documentations, ones can easily find themselves lost in translation.  In this article, we will look at QoS settings on Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC), specifically regarding packet marking in central switching mode, and try to understand relationships among 802.1p, 802.11e, WMM, and AVC, through lab experiments. Wireshark will be heavily used in this lab to provide insight to packet headers.

Cisco has released a Virtual Wireless LAN Controller (vWLC), a VM version of a controller that has always been an appliance or hardware module, with 60-day evaluation at installation. Your first thought might be less hardware cost and a WLC can take all the advantages of being a VM. For those of you who like to lab, like myself, but always have difficulty getting your hands on a WLC, this may seems like a great news that you can now have a WLC readily available for testing. Well, this is very true as long as you have thoroughly reviewed the vWLC Deployment Guide and understand all the requirements and limitations, otherwise, you may find out the hard way that things may not work the way you expected them to. In this article, we will point out two important caveats that you need to be aware of in order to have a vWLC setup and functioning correctly. Please refer to the vWLC Deployment Guide for pre-requisites and detail installation steps.