VLAN Pooling

When Wi-Fi is deployed in a high density environment (such as a stadium) or on a university campus to provide access for students, the number of IP addresses required for client devices can easily run into several thousands.

Allocating a single large subnet results in a high probability of degraded performance due to factors like broadcast/multicast traffic.

To address this problem, VLAN pooling provides a method by which administrators can deploy pools of multiple VLANs from which clients are assigned, thereby automatically segmenting large groups of clients into smaller subgroups, even when connected to the same SSID.

As the client device joins the Wi-Fi network, the VLAN is assigned based on a hash of the client’s MAC address (by default).