Wireless Access

We have a mix of AP-105 and AP-135 APs with a 3600 controller running 6.1.3.6 code.  We have some clients that associate with an AP and despite APs with better signal in the area, they don't move to the better AP.

I know this isn't something that happens automatically so I'm looking into which settings are normally changed to help.  I see in the RF optimization profile I can set a client that falls below a certain RSSI to be de-authenticated.  Besides that are there other places I should be looking and/or making changes?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

This sounds like a roaming issue

Please take a look to this document which address all aruba recommendations related to roaming

http://www.arubanetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/DG_Roaming.pdf

That's a great guide. One thing that I have found that works well for windows PC's is to modify the roaming aggressiveness setting on the client.  I increase it to make it more aggressive since ultimately the client decides where to connect. By setting it to be more aggressive it will roam between AP's more often but the upside is it will roam more often to an AP with stronger signal.

We had issues with workstations staying connected to an AP quite a bit away from the client when they go to a meeting down the hall. The signal was weak but they stayed connected. Changing the client roaming aggressiveness allowed the clients to roam to the closer AP with the stronger signal.

As mentioned in the quide there are other things you can do but that one change made a big difference for us.

Ian

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@istong wrote:

That's a great guide. One thing that I have found that works well for windows PC's is to modify the roaming aggressiveness setting on the client.  I increase it to make it more aggressive since ultimately the client decides where to connect. By setting it to be more aggressive it will roam between AP's more often but the upside is it will roam more often to an AP with stronger signal.

 

We had issues with workstations staying connected to an AP quite a bit away from the client when they go to a meeting down the hall. The signal was weak but they stayed connected. Changing the client roaming aggressiveness allowed the clients to roam to the closer AP with the stronger signal.

 

Ian

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How did you manage the client settings?  Did you have a GPO that you pushed out to clients to adjust the roaming aggressiveness?

yes exactly - we used a GPO to push out the settings. Had to manually set them on the Macintosh laptops running OS/X.