How does inter-station-traffic deals with broadcast

[bas1]

So im wondering how the inter station traffic handels broadcast traffic. Does it limit only on a single ap or also between different aps?

One of our customers asked if they can use a single user VLAN with 10.000 clients and inter-station-traffic enabled. Now i can see Aerohive advices 1022 in a single broadcast domain with a maximum of 2046. Is this still the case or is this updated?

[bas1]

Hi Jose,

Thank you for taking the time to answer this question.

We are aware of Bonjour serices. Also we have to keep in mind the number of mac addresses on the LAN.

Personally i like smaller subnets but we are checking the possibilities and experience for this use case.

I have enough info to proceed now. Thanks again!

[jose_gonzalez]

Single broadcast domain with a maximum of 2046 is still best practices. These 10,000 clients, if they are geographically separated they should be on separate IP networks. Sounds a professional services opportunity for your business. Clients will likely see a noticeable performance boost by disabling inter-station traffic with a network of your size. Enabling this will stop client to client broadcasts, which means certain services will stop working, like Bonjour, which translates to Apple TVs, AirPlay, and Chromecasts not working, and other non-enterprise iOT devices may stop working.

It's possible to use AirPlay, Apple TV, etc with inter-station traffic disabled, for that you need your wired and wireless on separate subnets. You place the Apple TVs on the wired network and selectively route MDNS traffic using your switches to your wireless network.

In addition with such a large subnet, broadcast traffic is probably crazy on the wired network as well, that too can affect performance on the APs and other services like printing. You want to try to reduce broadcast traffic on the wired side with a subnet that large. On Windows disable chatty broadcast services via group policies, like those that use SSDP protocol.

Again with such a large subnet, it probably requires a hugh amount of APs. Aerohive APs normally exchange client data via layer 2 LLC broadcast packets on the backhaul interface (wired network). With such a extremely large amount of APs on the same subnet this in itself will cause excessive broadcasts on the wired network, and affect AP performance, since they all have to process the data. The command no roaming cache-broadcast neighbor-type backhaul enable will reduce these LLC messages between APs, while still transmitting client data over the air to air within APs in range. This will reduce AP CPU consumption and reduce AP broadcasts on the backhaul interface. There is a place in HiveManager will that can be "unchecked", but don't recall were from memory.

Disabling QoS will also improve performance. no qos enable no-prompt - via CLI supplicant.