AI-Powered Auto RF

Overview

Meraki's RF excellence refers to the ability of wireless networking technology to deliver reliable and high-performing wireless connectivity in environments of varying scales and densities.  Meraki’s AI-Powered Auto RF powered by AI-Enhanced RRM helps us accomplish exactly this. 

Auto RF is a solution that automatically optimizes the radio parameters, such as selecting the best available channel and adjusting the power level, to maximize performance and minimize interference automatically and has proven to work very well. 

With the recent integration of AI-Enhanced RRM, we're making Auto RF more intelligent than ever, learning your network trends and providing you with a more personalized and seamless wireless experience, especially in enterprise-level deployments.

This page serves as a comprehensive guide to all the AI-driven features of Meraki's Auto RF, where we’ll highlight how they enable us to achieve wireless networking excellence on an enterprise scale.

 

The new Auto RF tab is introduced in the Radio settings page which will consist of all the AI-powered Auto RF features which majorly drive decisions based on historical data along with many Cisco Radio Resource Management features that will help optimize the RF network in a much more efficient and sophisticated way. 

Busy Hour

Reliable connectivity is key when it comes to a good wireless network. This is essential during the active hours of any business vertical. The busy hour feature will avoid unnecessary RF changes during the defined period and make the essential changes after the busy hour. This will eliminate client disconnections or roaming due to channel changes. 

Each business vertical has its own characteristic of busy hours, and sometimes it is hard to dictate from the central network admin perspective. With the power of Dashboard, Auto RF can now optimize each network individually for its unique busy hour daily.

During the Busy hour, Auto RF will only change an AP radio’s transmit power if required and minimize the AutoChannel calculation. Some exceptions will be DFS, Jammed channels, Access point addition or the Update AutoChannel button from the Dashboard. 

As shown in the figure below, Busy hour assignments can be set in 2 ways:
1.    Manual- Define the Network’s active hours. 

2.   Auto- Let the dashboard recommend the busy hour. Our system will analyze your past 6 weeks of data to understand your Active hours and set it automatically. The Auto Busy Hour is calculated based on the number of clients connected to the network and the amount of traffic sent/received.

Note: Make sure to have your Network Time zone configured accurately.

 

AI Channel Planning

A well-designed channel plan will ensure we get the most out of the RF network to operate for high-performance wireless network. This can be achieved by having a wide spread of channel availability in the AutoChannel list. But these channels get affected by DFS events and Non-Wi-Fi interferers like Jammers, which reduces the number of channels that can be used for Wireless network operations effectively. AI Channel planning maintains the channel avoid list for individual Access Point in the network.  

AI Channel planning essentially will avoid channels that are most affected by the following reasons:
•    Too frequent DFS events
•    Too frequent Jammed channel
•    AFC low power regulation (outdoor 6 GHz AP)

There are 2 aspects to AI Channel planning:

• Once a DFS or Jam event occurs, the channel will be put on a Channel Avoid List.

  • The Avoid period for this channel to stay in the Channel Avoid List depends on the severity.

  •  If a channel is in avoid mode, we strictly avoid using this channel in Auto RF unless all the channels are avoided. 

  • As shown in the figure below, insights and learnings for channel avoidance can be exported via CSV.

For channels in avoid mode:

Severity	Avoid/Mute Period
6	1 Day
5	2 Days
4	4 Days
3	8 Days
2	14 Days
1	30 Days

 

• After the Avoid period comes down to 0 Days

  • The Channel is moved to Monitor mode, which is monitored for 30 days for any new DFS/Jam events.

  • When a channel is in Monitor mode, Auto RF will use the channel normally.

  • Any new event occurring during this monitor period will increase the Severity of the channel in the avoid list.

For channels in monitor mode: 

Severity	Monitor Period
6	1 hour
5	2 hours
4	3 hours
3	4 hours
2	5 hours
1	6 hours

Download Details will contain a CSV with AI Channel Planning decisions and a list of channels affected including the start and end time for avoidance. 

 

FAQs

1.      During busy hour, what will happen if a manual change is made on an AP?

—> All the APs in the network will operate as usual unless there is a significant change in the channel assignment of the AP. If there are significant enough differences between the new candidate channel vs. the current operational channel, it will change.

2.      If changes are made to an RF Profile during busy hour, does it wait until after the busy hour?

—>New addition will not reset the busy hour criteria, which is much more sticky than a non-busy hour.

3.      Will auto-busy hour work with templates?

—> No.

4.      What if a customer has all of their assets under the same network spanning across multiple locations and timezones?

—> Unfortunately, Auto busy hour can calculate one busy hour fitting for all the APs in a particular network. Different locations need to be in different networks with appropriate timezone configurations. 

5.      How to track the severity table of the network and is it per AP?

—> It is per AP per channel per event type.

6.      What are the config options that are being modified to facilitate the channel avoidance?

—>No configuration is needed on the network. The algorithm will monitor number of DFS hits and decide the severity of the channel.

7.      Is there an overview of the scheduling the channel changes?

—>One can view the overview in AutoRF event log.

8.   What metrics are used to determine the busy hour - is it combination of current client count, usage (effectively what is displayed on the summary report)?

—>Combination of client count and usage.