Beacon Interval ?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 06:54:21PM -0700, Doug Bradford wrote:

> What should the beacon interval be set to. What is the default?

Default is 100, i.e., ten beacons per second. With Host AP mode, the
most noticeable effect of beacon interval is latency in sending unicast
packets to power saving stations and broadcast/multicast packets in
general. I would set beacon interval depending on the environment where
the AP is operating.

If you have many stations using power saving, you might want to keep the
beacon interval quite small since larger interval adds latency to
AP->STA packets. Even without any stations using PS, Host AP mode seems
to often wait for next DTIM beacon frame before sending pending
broadcast/multicast frames. This might be an issue in some cases. On the
other hand, every beacon frame take a small portion of the maximum
bandwidth and using a larger beacon interval would save some bandwidth
for data frames. So, this will be a compromise between enlarged latency
and saved bandwidth. I would suggest experimenting with different values
since there is not really any one-value-fits-all solution for this.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA