VLAN Pooling

When Wi-Fi is deployed in a high density environment such as a stadium or a university campus, the number of IP addresses required for client devices can easily run into the thousands. Placing thousands of clients into a single large subnet or VLAN can result in degraded performance due to factors like broadcast and multicast traffic. VLAN pooling is adopted to address this problem.

VLAN pooling allows administrators to a deploy pool of multiple VLANs to which clients are assigned, thereby automatically segmenting large groups of clients into multiple smaller subgroups, even when connected to the same SSID. As the client device joins the WLAN, the VLAN is assigned to one of the VLANs in the pool based on a hash of the client’s MAC address. To use the VLAN pooling feature, you first need to create a VLAN pooling profile, and then you can assign the profile to a specific WLAN or override the VLAN settings of a WLAN group.