Making RRM Work

There’s been a lot of good discussion within the Wi-Fi community recently about the viability of radio resource management (RRM), or the automatic selection of channels and Tx power settings by proprietary vendor algorithms. At Mobility Field Day 1 there was this excellent roundtable.

Personally, I usually fall into the static design camp, for many of the same reasons as others. I don’t want RRM to change the carefully tuned design I put in place and create an unpredictable RF environment, I’ve seen RRM do some very peculiar things like put adjacent AP’s on the same channels or crank up the Tx power of 2.4 GHz radios in an HD environment, RRM doesn’t disable 2.4 GHz radios when CCC is present, and it doesn’t plan DFS channels properly. Still, I’ve tried to keep an open mind.

Static designs have their limitations too. Statically designed WLAN’s can’t react to new neighboring networks contending for the same airtime, or new sources of RF interference that weren’t there when the static design was developed. It’s a real benefit of RRM that it does automatically correct for these problems.

Let me propose a hybrid approach that uses static design to handle the things that RRM does poorly, while still allowing RRM to react to the changing RF environment.

Static Design Elements

• Tx power levels should be statically assigned. Once finely tuned as part of the design process, why would they ever need to change?
• Excess 2.4 GHz radios in high density environments should be manually disabled because RRM simply won’t do this.
• DFS channels should be statically planned. RRM can clump DFS channels near one and other, resulting in a 5 GHz dead zone for clients without DFS support. Also, because of these clients, DFS channels should only be used when non-DFS channels are all already deployed. Therefore, statically plan DFS channels when needed in areas where non-DFS channels create secondary coverage, and let RRM dynamically plan the other bands. It’s less likely to have a neighbor or transient hotspot appear in the DFS bands anyway.
• Set channel channel bandwidth statically. The design process includes considering the capacity requirements of the WLAN to determine the appropropriate 5 GHz channel bandwidth. RRM algorithms don’t know what your capacity requirements are. 2.4 GHz should always be 20 MHz.

Things Left to RRM

• 2.4 GHz channel planning, once excess radios are disabled. Channels 1, 6, and 11 only, of course.
• 5 GHz channel planning, once DFS channels are statically assigned.
• That’s all.

The benefit of this approach is that it addresses many of the shortcomings of RRM while still retaining its main benefit: the WLAN can dynamically react to RF interference and transient neighbors by moving affected AP radios to clear spectrum. The things that RRM can’t do or does poorly are simply removed from its control.

Even within these constraints, there are still some vendor’s RRM algorithms I trust more than others. And even those I trust enough to try this with, I’d still want to monitor regularly to make sure the WLAN hasn’t turned into the RRM trainwreck the I’ve seen all too often when RRM is given free reign.