Cisco Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller White Paper

wired and wired infrastructure, simplifying life for

network administrators.
Aruba 7240 Wireless Controller supports 40Gbps

of throughput. In comparison, Cisco WLC 5760

wireless LAN controller can handle 60Gbps of

throughput, and the Catalyst 3850 switch supports

up to 40Gbps of wireless throughput.

Figure 1

page 1

shows the comparison

throughput with IMIX traffic. Cisco WLC 5760

achieved 50Gbps, Cisco Catalyst 3850 reached

37Gbps, and Aruba 7240 attained 8Gbps.

Compared to Aruba 7240, Cisco WLC 5760

provides 625% better throughput and Cisco

Catalyst 3850 delivers 460% better throughput.

Performance

Cisco Catalyst 3850, WLC 5760 and Aruba 7240

were tested for throughput using RFC 2544. For

the Cisco devices, lightweight access point

simulators were used instead of actual LAPs to

inject nearly 100% line rate traffic. The Aruba

7240 was tested connected directly to the Spirent

Testing Center, Cisco Catalyst 3850 and WLC

5760 do encapsulation and de-capsulation for

bidirectional traffic, while Aruba 7240 does not.
All three wireless controllers tested could maintain

maximum throughput with larger frames, however

the equation changes completely for smaller

frame sizes. See

Figure 2

. With smaller frame

sizes, Catalyst 3850 and WLC 5760 provided

more than 70% of line rate, while Aruba only

achieved less than 15% of line rate.
In this test, a 1420-byte frame size was used to

avoid fragmentation that is caused by

encapsulation overhead caused by the lightweight

access point simulator. The protocol overhead

includes IP and UDP headers for CAPWAP

tunneling, CAPWAP header, and 802.11 headers.
Cisco’s ability to handle more traffic throughput for

small sized frames is based on the new

programmable ASIC called UADP ASIC. Aruba

7200 series uses multiple network processors.

Dedicated hardware, such as ASIC, is faster than a

network processor. Networking devices from Cisco

with UADP ASIC provide better frame transmittal.

Production environments use small to middle sized

frames. See

Figure 3

page 3

. Regardless of the

frame size, the network process on an Aruba 7240

controller cannot scale with the increase in number

of packets, resulting in lower throughput at smaller

frame sizes. Because of expected growth of gigabit

wireless networking on each access point, the

number of supported access points and aggregate

throughput of a wireless controller will be important

factors. Throughput literally determines the number

of 802.11ac lightweight access points in production

environments.
Throughput testing used IMIX traffic, common for

measuring throughput in a real-world environment.

With IMIX traffic, different frame sizes with different

ratios are transmitted. The three controllers were

also tested with IMIX-based throughput. See

Table 1

page 3

on Ratio of IP Packet Sizes used

in this IMIX test.

Quality of Service

Aruba 7240 and Cisco WLC 5760 were tested for

QoS during high volume traffic. Mean Opinion

Score (MOS) describes whether the voice or video

communication experience is acceptable for use

using a numerical range between one and five. Five

is perfect, three is passable, two is poor, and one

is impossible to communicate. Normal land line

Figure 2: Line Utilization

Cisco WLC 5760

wireless controller

and Catalyst 3850

switch with

integrated wireless

controller both

demonstrate

superior throughput

by percent of line

rate compared to

the Aruba 7240

controller.

100

128

256

512

1370

1420

ne R

e (

)

Frame Size (Frames)

Aruba

7240

Cisco

Catalyst

3850
Cisco

WLC

5760

Source: Miercom, May 2013