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Constant roaming of clients with good signal strength
Hi everyone,
Clients of wireless networks keep roaming between APs while having good signal strength and stable connection. Some cases we observed that clients roam to worse signal strength radios on their own, causing impact for the users during video calls.
We have 3 floors on this site with MR53 and MR55 APs on the latest firmware version (29.5.1), open office with some meetings rooms environment.
Has anyone had a similar problem?
Solved! Go to solution.
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Clients are ultimately the decision maker on roaming. And each client type has different wireless adapters and drivers/baked in roaming behaviors. It's the most challenging part about wireless design & troubleshooting even 25+ years into enterprise 802.11 Wi-Fi.
That said when clients bounce around a lot between APs that often indicates an AP RF plan that needs some optimization. As mentioned above you could try disabling client load balancing (if you have that enabled now). Beyond that I would also review how your RF profiles are configured. In high density environments you often need to massage the RF profiles for things like lowering the maximum transmit power to create better/more appropriate RF cells and cell overlaps between APs.
In your deployment are the MR53s and MR55s mixed together per floor? Or, do the models align to specific floors? Mixing hardware generations like that, Wi-Fi 5 (ac) and 6 (ax), can introduce some extra challenges for clients. A Wi-Fi 6 capable client likely is programmed to prefer 802.11ax first and with certain signal strength cutoffs. A client like this could encounter roaming issues when it sees some 802.11ax APs while others are 802.11ac.
Every deployment is unique and therefore there's no one single answer for them all. As a start I would review the info in the High Density Deployment doc and see if any of those suggestions help your client roaming.
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Try disabling client load balancing.
Please, if this post was useful, leave your kudos and mark it as solved.
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Hi alemabrahao,
I disabled client load balancing this weekend and I am checking the results today.
As soon as possible I will bring news. Thanks!
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Devices have certain preferences for which AP to pick. For instance, iOS will prefer the newest PHY and wider channels. 802.11v can also make clients disconnect and move to a less utilised AP.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203068
https://youtu.be/gNRExt0TKMM
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Hi UKDanJones,
I disabled client load balancing this weekend and I am checking the results today.
As soon as possible I will bring news. Thanks!
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Clients are ultimately the decision maker on roaming. And each client type has different wireless adapters and drivers/baked in roaming behaviors. It's the most challenging part about wireless design & troubleshooting even 25+ years into enterprise 802.11 Wi-Fi.
That said when clients bounce around a lot between APs that often indicates an AP RF plan that needs some optimization. As mentioned above you could try disabling client load balancing (if you have that enabled now). Beyond that I would also review how your RF profiles are configured. In high density environments you often need to massage the RF profiles for things like lowering the maximum transmit power to create better/more appropriate RF cells and cell overlaps between APs.
In your deployment are the MR53s and MR55s mixed together per floor? Or, do the models align to specific floors? Mixing hardware generations like that, Wi-Fi 5 (ac) and 6 (ax), can introduce some extra challenges for clients. A Wi-Fi 6 capable client likely is programmed to prefer 802.11ax first and with certain signal strength cutoffs. A client like this could encounter roaming issues when it sees some 802.11ax APs while others are 802.11ac.
Every deployment is unique and therefore there's no one single answer for them all. As a start I would review the info in the High Density Deployment doc and see if any of those suggestions help your client roaming.
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Hi Ryan Miles,
As soon as possible I will bring news. Thanks!
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I see this most often with Apple devices on 1 customer's campus, but have seen it with one Windows device. Once the Apple device successfully connects to an AP on the 2.4GHz band, it switches to 5GHz. If the SNR or RSSI is "not high enough" (which has no apparent standard of what actually is "high enough" according to some random value that Apple decides), then it will roam.
Even with an ipad within 2 meters of an AP (in repeater mode) and Meraki showing signal strength of 49+ dBm, the ipad will still either randomly disconnect because it was "Out of range" (according to Meraki), or roam to the repeater's closest AP.
Do you see something like this?
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Apple has very defined roaming triggers - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203068
If you're seeing clients roaming before they've got that trigger threshold then it's almost certainly 802.11v that is the culprit.
the only way to fix is to survey and redesign the WLAN properly so that this doesn't happen.