Connected Clients vs. RF Utilization on Tarana
At Preseem, we collect a lot of data from ISP access networks to help operators move from reactive to proactive operations and make their teams more efficient.
Tarana is a recent entrant to the world of Fixed Wireless, and is rapidly gaining adoption across our customer base. As we’re working on collecting more data from these APs, we thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the aggregate metrics.
This scatter plot shows the relationship between the number of connected RNs on Tarana BNs (plotted on the x-axis) and the RF utilization percentage reported by the BN (plotted on the y-axis). Each point on the chart represents a data sample from a BN, illustrating how RF utilization scales as the number of clients increases. This sample was taken during prime-time hours on a Sunday evening.
There are a few interesting observations here:
- Even though Tarana BNs can support up to 250 clients, we don’t see any with over 200. In fact, the majority have less than 50 clients connected. This may indicate that some of these are in the early stages of deployment (in many cases funded by government grants), with future growth planned.
- There’s a clear correlation between the number of connected clients and the RF Utilization, especially at lower numbers of connected clients. This makes sense, since both the number of clients and the total bitrate use radio resources. A simple linear trendline implies that, on average, we would hit 100% utilization before we hit the 250 RN limit of the BN. Above 75 clients, however, there is more of a spread in RF Utilization, so your mileage may vary.
- We don’t see any RF utilization samples over 85%. It would be worth investigating whether it’s actually possible to drive the RF utilization higher in a production network or whether congestion happens at lower levels.
There are also some areas for future exploration:
- What does end-to-end latency look like at high utilization levels? Is there an upper bound on the practical limits of the Tarana RF utilization in a typical deployment?
- It would also be interesting to look at how the link rates of clients and their achieved bitrates plays into this.
What about you? Have you deployed, or are you planning to deploy, Tarana hardware? What additional aggregate metrics should we explore? Fill out the form here to let us know.
