we have updated the wiki on this setting:
“Interface belonging to the load balance group accepts new clients only if amount of already connected clients is less than on the rest of interfaces from the same group.”
In short “Load Balance Group” is Grouping is the interface,
the number of clients that house is to be preferentially connected to less CAP interface,
or would be okay with the understanding that?
It means that having 2 caps in group , first has 1 client and second no client, that I am able to connect only 1 additional client to cap 2 and all others will be rejected? And cap1 will not accept any client? How is it useful?
I tried load-balancing-group feature.
It work, but I meet next situation. When AP located not just in same place, some stations unable to connect to one AP because of radio conditions ant to other because of load balancing.
Would be good idea, if same client bounce repeating on load balancing some times, load balancing would be ignored/relaxed for this client temporarily.
I think it make load balancing work “softer”.
its a fact that load balancing in wlan only apply to ap´S serving a common area, please dont use this feature in another kind of scenario, must be complimented with proper power setting and ACL to guarantee a client is kicked when its far from an AP leaving a free slot and improving the chances of associating to AP closer to him.
The only thing that CAPSMAN is missing its datarate an MSC setting.
I think its the great and simplest manner to do it.
of course some people want a magic feature that do all the design work for them solving and preventing the consequences of improper design and planning on wlan, keep waiting seat…
… or go with your customers to tell them to buy a solution 10X more expensive just to discover that without a good planing and design there are no wlan product or technology that can work well.
2x cAP ac (“A”, “B”) on the same location, i.e. space between them is <20cm?
What happens when a client wants to connect to cAP AC “A”, it will refuse it? But won´t the client want to reconnect to “A” again as this is its best bet for its own view? How does it work that the client connects to “B”?
I am yet to try this, but as I understand Wi-Fi, the load-balancing shall be used only when the AP are very close to each other, so that each client sees at least two IPs. In this case, the load should balance out among all available units. I will try this as I probably have a large area to cover with 400 APs.
I tried load balancing once with CAPSMAN with 2 APs that were in the same room. It was a bit of a disaster - for some reason all the clients got put on only 1 AP - they kept getting rejected from the other - more like lopsided balancing so I ended that experiment. I was having other problems with that site though that might have contributed.
Load Balancing is useful when there are 2 Aps ( CAPs) very close one to the other…
For example, i might have 2 APs in a public space and because i don’t want 50 client devices to connect only to 1 AP but i want to distribute the load, so i add those 2 APs in a load balancing group thus when the AP1 has 1 client the second client will connect to AP2, the 3client will connect then to AP1 the fourth to AP2 and so on… So in the end there will be 25 clients on AP1 and 25 in AP2..!
This is what load balancing does… a good feature as long as you know how to use it..
I agree, this approach would be excellent and if I understand correctly is how Cisco handles this, and I am thinking how I can script this into RouterOS because I would also need this soft approach.