A commonly supported feature of WLAN access points is to map a single SSID to an Ethernet VLAN tag. If the access point supports multiple simultaneous bands for the same SSID (for example, 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz) it can map these onto distinct VLANs. The Nokia WLAN-GW supports provisioning of distinct per-SSID parameters on the VLAN tag ranges. It may be desirable for example, to have different address pools or retail service IDs for different SSIDs.
In some cases, VLANs assigned to a single SSID may not be continuous and configuring them in one large range it would cause overlap with another SSID. For example, this can happen if a deployment starts with only one band for each SSID and later adds another band, creating a mapping as follows:
SSID premium, 2.4Ghz Channel 6 to VLAN 10
SSID basic, 2.4Ghz Channel 8 to VLAN 11
SSID Premium, 5Ghz Channel 38 to VLAN 20
SSID basic, 5Ghz Channel 48 to VLAN 21
To support this case, the WLAN-GW supports configuration of VLAN range extensions under each VLAN range. Functionally, these extensions are part of the same VLAN range and share configuration. However, each extension counts as a full VLAN range for system VLAN range scale limits.