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Since Aruba has stateful firewall, it knows when a call is actually in session. If an AP has a phone call in session, it will not scan as normal. Once the phone call is finished, the AP will resume normal scanning functions.

I have tested this with our equipment and it does in fact make a big difference. When voice aware scanning is not enabled, I get 'dips' in phone calls: a dip is what I describe as a slight loss of communications which resembles loss of one syllable of a word (a clip is a very definite and longer loss of communications which results in loss of one or more entire words). When voice aware scanning is enabled, I get a perfect call (the best WiFi telephony I've ever experienced anyway).

You can apply traffic aware scanning rules to the Aruba firewall (starting with code version 3.1 I believe). It is supposed to work exactly like the voice aware scanning where the AP won't execute the scanning routines while the traffic indicated by the rule is actually in session. I have not used this function so I cannot say if it works or not (since voice aware scanning does work, I would suspect the traffic aware scanning works very well).

Aruba has functions built in to prevent channels (and power I think) from changing while a client is attached. They call it client aware in their interface. It does seem to work from what I have seen. I don't know the exact function which must be in place before the client aware feature will prevent changes (probably requires a live session to be in place rather than just associated but I don't know that for a fact).


p.s. Just saw devinators post.

Yes, Spectralink will tell you to use Static. I've talked with Spectralink in depth but they were very hesitant to say the words, "yes, you can use ARM with the Aruba equipment using Spectralink phones". I feel it is more a CYA than a statement of the functionality of the Aruba ARM.

Aruba recommends in most situations that you use ARM. I am aware of 1, possibly 2, customers where they turned off ARM but they were not in voice environments. I think it had more to do with the client aware feature where channels were changing more often than the customer would like.