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]

Meant no ill intent, Michael.  I am genuinely intrigued as to why the Ruckus Guru's think this.  As you're far from the 1st person from Ruckus to state this to me. 

And I get designing based on high power, but that just means that the contention area (between ~-82 the CCA limit per the .11 standard and the desired client servicing cell is larger as well.  There arent many enterprise client devices that I'm aware of that operate above 20 dBm.  Most are in the ~9-14 dBm range even.  So when a Ruckus AP can operate @ 27-30 dBm, that's quite a difference. 

Minimizing channel overlap in even a moderately dense WLAN environment would be quite challenging in the above scenario.  A sidebar question to this is related to any deeper level publicly available docs on "Per Packet Tx Power Adaptation" by chance?  It's an interesting compliment to higher powered APs, and I'd love to know more about what it's using to calculate power adjustments on a frame by frame basis.

I get so accustomed to the detailed documentation of vendors (Cisco mainly), that it can sometimes be frustrating when trying to understand other vendors feature sets. 

Thanks again,

Brian

[michael_brado]

Hi Brian, I wish we had that detailed document you ask for, and in dense deployments it helps if you can use some narrow/sectorized antenna APs to prevent that great overlap in such an environment.  Please have a look at the dense deployment best practice guide our System Engineers and Technical Marketing folks have compiled here:   https://support.ruckuswireless.com/documents/1345-high-density-wi-fi-best-practices-ap-deployment-gu...

[alexey_isakov]

If I were you I'd also try to look at clients tunes. We have got some bad expirience with several Apple PDAs within different vendors wifi networks. For example, try to switch off LTE helper in IOS of your PDAs.

[ben_davidson]

We are trying to use Roku for Airplay in the classrooms.

We found that some units (roku premier/express) are only on the 2.4 ghz channels 1-11.  It appears that you have to have both Roku and Laptop (MacBook Air 13") on the same frequency, either 2.4 or 5ghz.  Sadly, the Roku Premiere does not have 5ghz and we have no easy way to lock the laptops into 2.4 (or would really want to). 

[pieter_schepens]

We recently did some tests with Ditto (https://www.airsquirrels.com/ditto😞

• no need for discovery (you can eliminate Bonjour, multicast, routing, ...)
• existing receivers (Apple TV 4) perform very well
• multi platform: works with iPads, Windows, Macs, Chromebooks
• fast and reliable connection
• digital signage included