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doridian
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Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 12:30 am

Setup is as follows:

Modem <-> RouterA (RB2011) <-> RouterB (hAP)

RouterA and RouterB both have wired devices attached (computers, IPTV boxes, ...)

Both of them also provide a wireless network. What I want now is both of these access points to provide "the same" wireless network. As in, when you move from away from RouterA and closer to RouterB (and it looses signal of RouterA), the client swaps over without any visible downtime to him (or as low as possible).

From looking at the wiki and other threads so far, it seems as the correct way would be to set "wds mode" to "dynamic" and run RouterB as a "wds slave" while RouterA is an "ap bridge". The default WDS bridge would then be set to "br-lan" (the bridge powering all devices on RouterA and RouterB, including the other wired devices and wireless devices).

Is this correct?
 
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ZeroByte
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 12:55 am

I did this at my home once, and was very unhappy with the instability of things - I had a 951 acting as the wds slave.... it was constantly losing connection to the master or to my devices, but when I returned it to being just a bridge client, it was stable again. Remember that when you use such a configuration, the bandwidth of the wds slave is cut in half because it has to spend half its time being an access point and half its time being a client to the primary AP.....

If you have coax cable in your home, get a pair of MOCA 2.0 devices to be the backbone ethernet connection between the two access points, and then configure the second one to be a CAPS client.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... &A=details

These devices don't even have to be working in pairs - if you have 3, then you basically have just turned the coax wiring in your home into a 3-port ethernet switch.
Last edited by ZeroByte on Tue Dec 15, 2015 12:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
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doridian
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 12:58 am

I did this at my home once, and was very unhappy with the instability of things - I had a 951 acting as the wds slave.... it was constantly losing connection to the master or to my devices, but when I returned it to being just a bridge client, it was stable again. Remember that when you use such a configuration, the bandwidth of the wds slave is cut in half because it has to spend half its time being an access point and half its time being a client to the primary AP.....

If you have coax cable in your home, get a pair of MOCA 2.0 devices to be the backbone ethernet connection between the two access points, and then configure the second one to be a CAPS client.
Both APs are connected directly via a wire (CAT5e, 100MBit/s ports). Does this mean I don't use WDS and something else? If so, what else?
 
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ZeroByte
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 1:02 am

Both APs are connected directly via a wire (CAT5e, 100MBit/s ports). Does this mean I don't use WDS and something else? If so, what else?
Good. (And you don't need the MOCA devices I linked above.) ;)

You'll want to set up both as AP-Bridge with the same SSID and same encryption, etc.

The secondary device will just operate as a bridge - with wlan1 and ether1 connected to bridge1 (and ports ether2-ether5 set to use master=ether1)

For roaming to work best, I'd imagine that CAPsMan is the way to go - I haven't ever messed with CAPsMan though, but there are videos on YouTube and Wiki articles about how to set it up.
 
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doridian
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 1:03 am

You'll want to set up both as AP-Bridge with the same SSID and same encryption, etc.
Same channel or different channel? I would assume different channels?
 
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ZeroByte
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 1:12 am

You'll want to set up both as AP-Bridge with the same SSID and same encryption, etc.
Same channel or different channel? I would assume different channels?
I was reading an article about this subject recently where the author recommended using the same frequency and lower power - because if they're on different channels, the client has to handle the roaming, and using the same BSSID and frequency hid the fact from the client that it was even roaming......

I don't remember if this was a Mikrotik solution or someone else's product, or what.... the article also mentioned that a controller-based platform is able to basically force the client to roam to the best AP, and I was more interested in controller-based anyway (e.g. CAPsMan / UniFi / Aruba / etc)

That's how I'm going to set up my second AP at my house.
 
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 11:11 am

You'll want to set up both as AP-Bridge with the same SSID and same encryption, etc.
Same channel or different channel? I would assume different channels?
Different channels, same SSID & security settings, and roaming will be automatic.

But roaming is usually decided by the client device so you have no real control over it, however you can try to force roaming by putting access-lists (i.e kicking clients with low signal, hoping that they will reconnect to the other AP).
For example here, limit is -76dB
/interface wireless access-list
add forwarding=no signal-range=-75..120
add authentication=no forwarding=no signal-range=-120..-76
 
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ZeroByte
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 4:33 pm

The CAPsMan configuration is very similar:

https://blog.linitx.com/howto-improved- ... t-roaming/
 
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doridian
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Re: Correct setup for wireless client roaming

Tue Dec 15, 2015 11:49 pm

The CAPsMan configuration is very similar:

https://blog.linitx.com/howto-improved- ... t-roaming/
Thanks for that, works perfectly.
Only thing I wish RB could do was "zero-downtime" roaming, so that one access point can "seamlessly" hand off clients to another. I have no idea how other things implement such feature but Ubiquiti claims to have such feature for example.
The forced disconnect is pretty straight on and works fast with reconnecting to the correct AP but of course it still causes some slight interference.

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