One of the control plan functions is Distributed Radio Management (DRM). As Control Plane is fully distributed, the slide below tends to indicate that between 2 APs, "RF Management" can be done either Over-the-Air _or_ Over-the-LAN-infrastructure. Are there any differences between what are being transmitted in "over the air" vs "over the LAN"? If not, why we are doing in both?
It is not WLAN (RF) “or” LAN, it is “and”. APs will discover neighbouring APs over the air (RF) and exchange the client-context-details with those neighbouring APs over the LAN.
The control plane of the OmniAccess Stellar WLAN solution relies on communications between neighbor only APs. Each AP communicates with its adjacent APs with:
“over the air” exchanges in order to discover each other by announcing key information like AP management IP addresses through the Neighbor Management Protocol
“over the LAN” exchanges (a mix of L2 broadcast/multicast and IP connectivity between AP management IP addresses) in order to agree on RF parameters (e.g., channel utilization and transmit power) and to share roaming clients’ contexts.
Yes, I understand it is “and”. The slide has ‘RF Management’ which can happen both “Over the air” _and_ “Over the LAN”. I *think* this is wrong. In the Golden RFP, it states that:
+ “Over the air” – – – to discover each other by announcing key info like AP management IP addr through the Neighbor Management Protocol
+ “Over the LAN” – – – to agree on RF parameters (eg. channel use and transmit power) and to share roaming clients’ contexts
So ‘RF Management’ only happens Over the LAN. Am I correct?
Why is this wording detail that relevant? If you don’t know the neighbour, you can’t do any management over the LAN, therefore my personal view is that both “RF visibility over the air” and “communication over the LAN” are necessary. If your remark is that no sensitive information should be exchanged over the air, then it is “yes” as client-relevant information is only sent via LAN.