I noticed on my phone that most of the time spent connecting to a Mikrotik network is in the “Obtaining IP address” phase which makes me thing the DHCP server is to blame. Is there a way to disable the ping that the built in DHCP server does before assigning an IP? Specifically, this behavior: “if the client receives a dynamic address (taken from an IP address pool), the router sends a ping packet and waits for answer for 0.5 seconds”. Or is there any other way to speed up IP acquisition that doesn’t involve static IPs?
I’m deploying a single SSID which requires roaming, and 0.5 seconds is a large delay when you want roaming to be as seamless as possible, eg if a voip call is in progress.
I ran packet sniffer on my wifi connection, then released and renewed my IP on my Windows machine.
I see my machine requested the same IP it had before, and 0.003 seconds later the Mikrotik acknowledged.
I don’t see the Mikrotik pinging or doing an arp lookup. I do see my client machine doing an ARP lookup to see if anyone else is claiming the IP given.
None of the Mikrotik wifi stuff supports roaming or fast auth, you may have to look elsewhere if you want to keep a voip connection live. Ubiquity has zero handoff.
Your phone may do it’s own ARP lookup to see if anyone else has the same IP.
With Windows I notice my connection was up after 0.003 seconds and traffic was flowing, then Windows did an ARP lookup 2.5 seconds later to see if anyone else had the same IP. I notice on Windows the “Obtaining IP” status showed for about 2.5 seconds..