Wireless Access

When I'm doing a site survey, and AOS is trying to force clients onto the "best" AP will it affect my survey?

 

I'm wondering what it looks like to the client when an AP is ignoring or withholding beacons to try to trick that client into looking elsewhere.

 

You would only have to really consider that if you are doing an active survey. A passive survey only measures signal strength and roaming is not involved. If you are doing an active survey you should turn those features off to remove active balancing as a variable.

Load balancing mechanisms are typically employed when you cannot get access points spaced and/or powered correctly and you want to override client behavior to improve a high density deployment.

Active survey.  Which explains the occasionally "missing" AP.

 

You might want to share your thoughts on the load-balancing features with the Engineering Team, whenever I call in for support that's the first thing they want turned on. I have a very sparse environment, 90,000sqft - 25 AP92/93 - 30 clients.

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@msabin wrote:

Active survey.  Which explains the occasionally "missing" AP.

 

You might want to share your thoughts on the load-balancing features with the Engineering Team, whenever I call in for support that's the first thing they want turned on. I have a very sparse environment, 90,000sqft - 25 AP92/93 - 30 clients.

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msabin,

 

What I mentioned is an approach based on limited information, not hard and fast rules.  I do not know the details of your deployment and it is difficult for anybody who is not onsite to also know that.  As a result, I cannot say what engineering say is bad, I can only offer a general approach based on what I see here.  If you call in to engineering and you say you have a roaming issue, they might tell you to turn on load balancing or clientmatch to solve your specific issue, and it might work.

 

If you want to survey to diagnose a problem, I would first do a passive survey without those features turned on to see the true power levels a client is getting in all areas to see if it would better help to supplement coverage, rather than turn those features on.  Load balancing features can only do so much to make up for poor coverage and a poor client roaming algorithm.  Baseline your coverage first, to get a good general impression of how it looks.  Make sure you do a side-by-side with the client in question to see the difference between the laptop adapter you are measuring and how the client reports.  Contact the manufacturer to see if they have any advice on the roaming threshold and see if you are getting that in the passive survey.

 

Everything that I am mentioning might seem overly basic, but that is what is necessary before any load balancing mechanisms are turned on.  Again, RF features like Client match work the best when basic coverage is met, and can only do so much...

 

In the end, if you intend to do an active survey, you have to configure your survey laptop's adapter to match as many characteristics of the client so you can be ensured that is the way the client will truly operate in that environment.

I didn't mean to take your comment as applying in all situations, nor to indicate that the engineer was making a bad call.

 

I am saying that the engineers I get when I first open cases seem to have a standard set of solutions which do not take into account my situation.

Msabin,

 

Thank you for explaining that.

 

If at any time in a support call you feel like you are not getting anywhere you are well within your rights to ask that it be escalated.  Even seasoned engineers might overlook basic facts and as painful as it may be, support tries to get some of those basic issues out of the way ahead of time.  Sometimes the reason why a problem is not solved is that support does not have enough information to come to a reasonable conclusion, so the questioning may go into strange directions, indeed.  Many times it is because of incorrect assumptions by the caller that need to be double checked.  I am not making excuse for TAC but we are at times in situations where we have to reverse engineer a problem to come to a solution and its painful for all.