Controller-less WLANs

Environment : Aruba Instant with Captive Portal Guest SSID configuration

With captive portal authentication; an user is initially placed in a captive-portal role i.e. internal-cp / external-cp / role configured by admin. When the user completes captive portal process; the user is moved to post-authentication role which wouldn't pop-up captive portal page. When an user is idle (example : phone is in locked & asleep);  the user would be timed out and removed. When the user reconnects after inactivity timeout; the user would be placed in the initial role and would have to go thru captive portal process again.

To improve user experience; administrator may want to increase the time period for which the guest user can be idle. The inactivity-timeout option under SSID configuratioin allows to configure this value. Prior to 6.3.1.2-4.0.0.3; the value can be configured to max value of 1 hour (3600 second). With 6.3.1.2-4.0.0.3; the value can be set upto 24 hours for guest SSID. The value remains 1 hour for other SSID types.

It should be noted that increasing the value means inactive users wouldn't be removed from the network for longer period. Thus, resulting in number of user entry being considerably higher than actual user count. For large deployment; the option of captive portal + MAC authentication can be considered. CPPM Authentication server has MAC caching option which allows caching MAC address during the first captive portal authentication and then use it for MAC authentication when user connects again (thus user won't get captive portal splash again).