By the standard, the default is 102.4ms. It should ALWAYS be set to something close to this value.
Description:
Setting a lower beacon interval than 102.4ms may help your devices receive information about various parameters from the AP at a faster rate but mobile devices may suffer from a lower battery life.
Beacons and probe response are two types of required wireless management frames that can increase channel utilization. Beacon frames are used by the VAP to advertise the SSID and inform connected clients that frames are waiting for delivery
As the number of wireless networks operating on a specific channel increase so does the amount of beacon frames and probe responses.
The key to successful WiFi deployment is eliminating SSID redundancy. Redundancy occurs when multiple SSIDs are deployed providing different types of access, but the configurations used could allow for them to be consolidated into a single SSID
Investigation:
- Login to Meraki Dashboard
- Select Network-Wide
- Monitor>Packet Capture
- For security appliances drop down, select for access points
- Select access point
- Select output option
- Start Capture
Mitigation:
This feature allows the administrator to set the lowest supported data rate to 6Mbps on a per-SSID basis. Although it may reduce the connectivity options of 802.11b clients, it does increase the data rate of beacons and probe responses. Therefore these transmissions consume less airtime.
When band steering is enabled, dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) APs only reply to probe requests on the highest supported frequency band for the client. This reduces the number of probe responses on 2.4GHz by pushing clients to 5Ghz where supported.
Meraki Solution:
- Login to Meraki Dashboard
- Select “Wireless”
- Configure>Access Control
- Under Wireless options Adjust minimum birates (Mbps)