Hi all,
I’ve just been setting up Mikrotik based wireless network in my house. I have an Omnitik as the main AP running nstreme. I then have three pairs of hAP AC-lites each pair connected back to back with ethernet. One runs nsteme as backhaul to the Omnitik, the other runs 802.11 on 5 and 2.4Ghz for clients to connect. I’m using CAPsMAN with the Omnitik controlling it all. All seems to work pretty well (I’m really impressed with CAPsMAN!).
However… I have one room in the house, that is equidistant between two of the APs and clients in it keep swapping back and forth between the two APs. Originally I have an access rule in to prevent low signal client, and boot a low signal off the AP so it hopefully re-associates with a stronger AP. This was to prevent the clients being too sticky as you roam around the house.
However I’m trying to work out how to make the clients in the ‘middle’ room pick one AP and stick with it. I’ve temporarily dropped the access rules to see if that helps, but it seems the clients (in this case an iPhone 5s) just keeps trying to swap back and forth and eventually seems to give up.
My options seem to be:
Add another AP in that room… which I don’t really want to do for cost reasons, and I think there must be a better way to solve this
Drop the power of one of the APs so that the other is a more ‘obvious’ choice. However I think that will just move the problem somewhere else. Also both the APs need to be able to keep the power up in order to serve their clients in adjacent rooms.
blacklist particular clients from one AP… but that is a tedious approach, and also I think the issue seems to be the client disassociates from one AP before attempting to connect to another, but doesn’t realise it is blacklisted from that AP until too late. As far as the client is concerned the signal is strong so it should be able to connect.
Kicking low signal clients using an Access list usefulness depends a lot on client wireless implementation, some completely break, so I rarely used this for this reason on WLAN scenarios.
I’d test by either relocating an AP depending on typical usage areas, so that there will always be a higher signal ap on a given main usage area, or play lowering AP power to achieve the same.
The best approach is that same signal scenarios only happen on “transition areas” if that’s possible (stairs, corridors, etc) and the own client motion aids in transitioning.
Thanks. I’ve disabled the access rules that kick off a low signal client and that does seem to actually work a bit better now. As for moving the APs, yeah, I might be able to move the one on the top floor to the other side of the room, such that the ‘same signal’ area is in a less obvious place.
That will help, as AP coverage shape is like an sphere (a toroid actually) placing first floor AP near say East, and moving top floor AP near West, will help placing both spheres so that the intersection is minimized.
I was surprised at how much more the signal seemed to travel vertically in the house that horizontally. So I’ve arranged the three access points to serve the room their are in and the room above/below them mostly. It was meant to be one per floor, but seems more likely to pick up an AP above you than one next door it seems.
This is a fairly modern (10 year old) house in the UK. Don’t think there is anything in particular in the walls. I know in my old Grade II listed Georgian Townhouse office the walls were made of cobb with chicken wire in… blocked wifi (2.4ghz at the time) completely.
