802.11n throughput testing for Aruba AP 125

This morning we did some testing with a high-throughput wlan (see profile at the bottom of the page) using the Aruba 125. We setup the VennLab HT SSID for testing locally using 802.11n on the 5Ghz channels exclusively. We also enabled the 40Mhz wide channel in order to maximize throughput. Our testing yielded very good results as you can see below.

Our test setup consists of two MacBook Pro’s each running the iperf network utility (via MacPorts) with manually configured IP addresses. To establish a baseline, we first connected to RLAB, a network that is already established on our Aruba infrastructure. This is an 802.11g only isolated wlan that also allows client to client connectivity.


Connected to "RLAB" to get a baseline, the airport sees an RSSI of –49 which is typical of a very good connection and shows a transmit rate of 54 as would be expected. Here are the iperf stats using the default settings:

Macintosh-214:~ donwright$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 256 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
Tested first with RLAB (802.11g standard wlan)

[ 4] local 10.10.10.4 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.3 port 49335
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 8.45 MBytes 7.04 Mbits/sec

This seems low, but maybe that’s an iperf thing, which is kind of confusing since they use the capital M for megabits. If I take this at face value and move on, the increase with 802.11n does show up.

Connecting to my 802.11n "VennLab" shows a similar RSSI of 50, but with a Transmit Rate of 300, a 6X increase. This increase seems to be validated in the iperf tests below which average about a 6X jump to 50 Mbits/sec.

[ 4] local 10.10.10.4 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.3 port 49336
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 57.5 MBytes 48.2 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 10.10.10.4 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.3 port 49337
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 56.1 MBytes 47.0 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 10.10.10.4 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.3 port 49338
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 64.4 MBytes 53.9 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 10.10.10.4 port 5001 connected with 10.10.10.3 port 49339
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

Click to enlarge: Benchmarking of Aruba throughput 802.11n 

Previously, when we did the same test with equivalent Cisco AP. We didn't get that good reading. Cisco wireless still far behind Aruba technology. For me, Aruba Network still the best in wireless infrastructure. That is why, they conquer the world wide campus solutions for wireless networking. The security features offered by Aruba complied with US Military requirement.. (implemented for US Air Force).  Major telco companies also choose Aruba solution. There are still the best in the market.