Cisco Cisco Aironet 1200 Access Point

The access point now supports QoS, primarily in the area of interactive VoIP telephones from 
Spectralink and Symbol Technologies Corporation. The access point also provides priority 
classification, prioritized queueing, and prioritized channel access for other downlink IEEE 802.11 
traffic such as streaming audio or video traffic.

With this software release, the access point does not include any QoS enhancements in Cisco IEEE 
802.11 client software. 

QoS refers to the ability of a network to provide improved service to selected network traffic over various 
underlying technologies including Ethernet and IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. In particular, QoS features 
provide improved and more predictable network service that:

Supports dedicated bandwidth

Improves loss characteristics

Avoids and manages network congestion

Shapes network traffic

Sets traffic priorities across the network

The QoS implementation on the access point has the following limitations and restrictions:

Provides only prioritized QoS for downlink traffic on IEEE 802.11 links.

Does not support a general-purpose QoS signalling protocol, uniform admission control, guaranteed 
bandwidth, and other features that are generally associated with parametized QoS.

Supports rudimentary admission control mechanisms for Cisco and Symbol VoIP phones.

Does not provide a method for prioritizing uplink traffic on IEEE 802.11 links.

Requires a small DTIM beacon period to support jitter-sensitive streaming multicast audio and video 
applications.

Supports IEEE 802.11e EDCF-like channel access prioritization but does not support IEEE 802.11e 
QoS frame formats.

This feature allows the use of an AAA server to authenticate clients if the user manager functionality is 
enabled on the access point. At the end of a successful login, the AAA server verifies the user login and 
passes back the appropriate privileges for the user or an administrator. The following points are pertinent 
to this feature:

The access point can use either RADIUS or TACACS for user authentication.

The access point tries to authenticate to the user locally first. If the user is not found locally, the 
access point authenticates to the remote AAA server.

By default, the access point is configured to perform only local administrative authentication.