Large campus network: best practices for Airplay (+ issues with lots of Apple TV's)

[pieter_schepens]

We have a large campus network: ZoneDirector ZD1200, ± 50 AP's R500 and R510, ± 100 Apple TV's, lots of iPads (1:1 and shared iPads). The Apple TV's and iPads are on the same SSID, but in small VLAN's/subnets. The backbone of our network has high performance. WiFi speed and reliability are perfect.
We use AirPlay mirroring to the Apple TV's to cast the screen of the teachers iPads to the projector or TV screen. We don't use Bonjour Gateway. From time to time, we experience drop outs or lag in the Airplay streaming. 

We'd like to know, when configuring a WiFi network for AirPlay with lots of Apple TV's:

• What are the best WLAN settings?
• What are the best settings for things like self healing, background scanning, load balancing, etc...?
• What are the best settings for the AP's?
• Any other best practices to make AirPlay reliable?

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[brian_powers]

Following Apple's guides may be of use.

https://help.apple.com/deployment/ios/#/apd8fc751f59
and
https://help.apple.com/deployment/ios/#/ior65f75e248

[eightohtwoeleve]

I think we are expecting a better answer.

[fghzuio]

I'd second that, a link to the wikipedia page of apple ios would have been as suficiant 😉

[francis_aromin]

Ironically, many of our Airplay issues went away when we had the AppleTVs connect to a different SSID and VLAN.  This way, it forces the iPad to use direct, peer-to-peer Airplay instead of through our WiFi network.  It also solved the issue of iPads seeing too many AppleTVs as it only detects those in its immediate vicinity (discovery is via bluetooth, I think).

Our environment:
140+ classrooms, each with an AppleTV.  220 APs (R500,R510,R310) on Smartzone.

AppleTV SSID has no password, but uses MAC authentication.  This makes it easier for us to join them on WiFI, versus adding profiles for 802.1x.  We used WPA2 passwords before, but those tended to leak out to students.

We also disabled channels 149 and 153 as these are used by peer-to-peer Airplay.

Hope this helps!