@webcore wrote:
Sorry if I'm about to sound ignorant, but wouldn't you want your client associations to be at best-range with the closest AP at all times? I don't see any advantage to keeping a client on an AP when there's another AP closer to the supplicant. When wouldn't you want to do this? The only thing I can think of would be if you wanted to balance between more than one AP in the same room, but then even still, I can't see any advantage.
I've got this very situation happening at all of my locations, and I'm going to illicit some change requests to get Min Tx EIRP turned up from 3 to 9 (no idea why it was set so low in the first place), and set the Local Probe Threshold Request value to 30 and do some testing on that; I'm tired of looking at big, blue lines in AirWave that traverse the entire distance of my floor plans, and I think this should fix it.
If anyone is interested, I'll post back what I find out.
Webcore,
This thread is more than a year old, but let me update it with principles that everyone can use:
- It is desirable to have a client on the closest access point for the best performance - TRUE, but it is only one factor that determines performance. If there are more clients on the closer access point or more legacy clients on the closer access point, it *could* lead to worse performance for that client to be on the closer access point. If there is also more bandwidth consumption on the closer access point, that could also lead to worse performance. ClientMatch in the upcoming ArubaOS will address these issues in a more comprehensive fashion. The client ultimately makes the decision at the end of the day. Having clients on the closest access point is desirable, but is not the the only factor that determines performance, is my point.
- If you have the Min TX at 3 and all your access points are at 3, that could mean that you have too much coverage on that band. You do not want the TX power of the access points to be lower than the clients. If you find your access points at 3, you might want to remove coverage (turn some radios on that band into air monitors) so that access points can increase power to match client output (12 is good).
- The big blue lines in airwave are separate and have to do with accurate placement of access points and how many access points can actually hear those clients to be able to draw an accurate location (3 or more is required for decent accuracy). I will let rgin comment on that.
- If you decide to use local-probe-threshold parameter, make sure you use the "hide ssid" parameter in the Advanced portion of the SSID profile so that clients cannot discover access points via their beacons. This configuration will of course NOT work on SSIDs where it needs to remain visible. The local-probe-threshold parameter should be used if you have extreme cases where clients hang on to access points very far away. Remember that the stronger signal from your access points can also be coming from the floor above and below; your clients can't tell the difference.
Again, this is general advice and more information about your setup might dictate you make other changes.