Wireless Access

I have a group of AP135s and IAP135s being managed by a mobility controllr all within a single VLAN. Is it normal that before a client roams to another client it has to drop the connection with the current AP and restablish connectivity with the other AP? I guess there is some settings to allow smooth roaming from 1 AP to another. Can someone help me with such settings?

Secondly, connected clients suddenly drop their connection completely and recnnect or sometimes do not reconnect because of authentication failure.

Can there be a workaround for this also??

 

thank you

How far apart are your access points?

At what power are they?

 

The APs are just 2-3 meters apart at a min power of 12 and max of 18.

 

Are the clients supposed to completely drop the connection to the APs if they are roaming from 1 AP to the other or if they are load balancing? If not is there a way to fine tune so that they do not drop connection whiles they are roaming.

Is this a consistent problem with a certain type of devices? Keep in mind that roaming is a client decision and some client drivers are just horrendous at making roaming decisions.

Its not with specific devices, sometimes there is an authentication error after it drops the connection (even though they are in the same ESSID and single Vlan) and cannot automatically reconnect. So i have to manually connect again.

Why are your access points 2 to 3 meters apart?  That is too close.  It should be about 20 meters apart, in a typical office scenario.

Sorry, i mean 20-30 meters apart.

 

 

Can you print the output of "show AP essid"

Sure. Find attached results of the "show ap essid"

Okay,

 

Is VLAN 1 shared with wired clients?  If so, please enable "Drop Broadcast and Multicast" in the Virtual AP profile, of that SSID.  Broadcast propagation could be negatively affecting your data traffic.

 

That setting has already been enabled and is running. As well as enabling "Convert Broadcast ARP request to unicast"

do you have a diagram of where your access points are positioned?

find attached files on hw my APs are positioned.

What are the walls made of in those diagrams?

Some are concrete walls but most of them are wooden partitions.

The rooms that are concrete normally would require an access point for every other room.  The "every 20 meters" rule normally applies if there is just drywall between rooms and if you just want coverage.  The mystery is, what is behind the wood walls; is it concrete, as well?

 

Type "show ap arm state" to see how well access points see each other.  For each list, each access point should see a valid "neighbor" or roaming candidate at 25 SNR or more for it to be a practical roaming destination for other clients.  

 

Based on your client number, it seems that you have a lot of density.  From your diagram, it looks like you are deployed for just coverage.  If you cannot add more access points, you should move the access points in the halls to rooms where people congregate. 

The access points are deployed just as you are suggesting. As you can see from the diagrams, there are single access points in offices with concrete walls. The othere offices with wooden partition do not. And there is no concrete behind the wooden partition. Can you throw more light on scenarios that can cause the clients to disconnect completely from the AP and have an authentication error when trying to reconnect?

What is the error?

Authentication error.

What is the exact message?

Normally with clients using mobile phones, they can see the status messages on their phone till it connects. So it starts from obtaining ip address, then it goes to authentication error.