topic Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ? in Community and Online Support Services

Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

hugo_martin_696 — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 09:37:05 GMT

hi there,

i can't find this most needed feature for my usage (multicast video stream), my APs seems to be limited to approximately 6-Mbits using multicast (5ghz/WPA-auto) and i need more 🙂

- so is there a settings somewhere to achieve this ?

- does min-rate setting affect multicast rate ?

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

neil_neil_67001 — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 23:24:00 GMT

Hi Hugo,

Multicast traffic is usually sent at the highest mandatory data rate. The easiest way to see the rates and how they are set is to capture a beacon.

By the way, I'm sure you already know, but using WPA will disable all the 802.11n data rates.

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

munish_munish — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 23:49:49 GMT

Hi Hugo,

Neil is right, controller will send with the highest mandatory data rate.

If you have set 6M,9M, 11M, and ,24 as mandatory rates, the controller will send multicast packets at 24M only.when you set 9M to mandatory and the higher rates to supported, the controller will send multicast packets at 9M.

Check the need of your network/environment. To attain the multicast rate in the entire cell , It is good it keep it on 9M to be the mandatory rate, This will make the cell size a bit smaller. By doing this you can also prevent the network from B only clients.

Thanks,
Munish

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

michael_brado — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 23:53:01 GMT

Ruckus SmartCast processes multicast at lowest configured data rates, default 1mb
in 2.4G, 2mb in 5G. As Neil implies, configure your WLAN with WPA2/AES combo
(not auto), and you can configure a couple WLAN commands thru your ZoneDirector
CLI configure mode. Ofdm-only, will set the bss-minrate to 6mb. We have a built
in Multicast-to-Unicast conversion, called Directed Multicast, which will attempt to
send the first 5 group members their traffic via TCP over UDP. You may wish to
experiment with DM enabled and disabled, and with bss-minrate of 6 or 12mb.

enable
config
wlan
ofdm-only
(by default sets bss-minrate to 6mb)
no qos directed-multicast
qos directed-threshold 0
end
end

I suggest to test with these settings first, and you may increase the bss-minrate
if you are near enough to get good throughput.

enable
config
wlan
bss-minrate 12
end
end

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

michael_brado — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 23:56:26 GMT

If you do not specify OFDM-only, you may have CCK clients who only communicate
at 1, 2, 5.5, 11mb, and should try bss-minrate 5.5 or 11. With OFDM-only, you can
set bss-minrate to 6mb, 12mb, 18mb (but I wouldn't go higher unless you're close).

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

hugo_martin_696 — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 09:32:44 GMT

thank you all for your answers,
I still need to understand some points :

What do you mean by "Mandatory data rate" ?
Is it related to the bss-minrate ?

Is multicast rate related to bss-minrate ?

It seems that the multicast rate in my APs is moving (related to client connection ?). Is this true ? How can i fix it ?

(We are not using directed multicast (crowded audience), we activate ofdm-only, we use 5 GHz band only. )

Hugo

Re: Does anyone at ruckus know about multicast rate ?

neil_neil_67001 — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:07:16 GMT

Mandatory and Basic are words that are used interchangeably.

According to the 802.11 standard, when rates are specified as "basic rates", it means that any client that wants to connect to an AP MUST be able to modulate on every rate that is specified as "basic". You may see this referred to as a "Basic Rate" in a frame capture, though it may also be called mandatory - it's the same thing in this context.

I set up a frame capture to illustrate for you:

When a Ruckus ZD WLAN is set up with default settings, the rates are set as:

After connecting and issuing the ofdm-only command, the data rates are set like this:

I hope this helps.

Neil