Saturday, May 21, 2011

Beacon Period commands on Autonomous APs

Time for another post!

I'm hard at work looking at some more autonomous AP commands.  This time it's beacon periods!  So, on an AAP, how would you configure the beacon period to 100 milliseconds?

One would be tempted to look under the radio interface:

"ap#conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
ap(config)#int d0
ap(config-if)#beac ?
  dtim-period  dtim period
  period       beacon period

ap(config-if)#beac per ?
  <20-4000>  Kusec (or msec)"


What's that, you've never heard of Kusec before?!  Where have you been?


I looked it up, and apparently Kusec is a kilomicrosecond...  And what, exactly, is that?  1.024 ms.  So now, to set your AP beacon period to 100 milliseconds you are forced to do a bit of math:


100 ms / 1.024 = 97.66 Kusec.


What about the DTIM period?  That's a bit easier - just the number of beacons to wait before multicast traffic is transmitted.

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