Wireless Access

Hello All,

I have a network that is synonymous to Core, Distribution and Access Architecture. With DHCP and Controller terminated on the Core Switch, while the Mesh portals terminated on the Access Switches.

Access Switches are connected with Distribution switches on port channels.

When I run SPAN on the Mesh portal uplinks, could observe the DHCP discovery from the Mesh points being sent across but no DHCP response for them being learnt. On distribution the AP MAC could be seen flapping across multiple port channels. Could this be considered an issue for the Mesh points failing to get an IP address?

Is not it expected for the Mesh point to find a Mesh portal with comparatively the best RSSI and then find the optimal path on the network rather than continuously trying to reach out to multiple mesh portals and thus being learnt on multiple port channels of the Mesh portal’s IDFs?

Please comment if someone else too have experienced similar issue.

Thanks

A mesh point will associate with the nearest, or strongest, mesh portal that it finds over the air and associate via WPA2-PSK (just like a client). The mesh point's mac address would then show up on the portal's wired port (your switch would see two MACs on the phy, and if there are more points on the same portal, you would have an 1+n where n is the number of mesh points on the wired port). The DHCP request would then egress from the mesh point, over the wireless link to the portal, and out the portal's wired interface. 

if you are seeing that request come from multiple portals, chances are you have a loop somewhere in your mesh, or different mesh points that are wired to the same switch connected to one or more different portals.