Unwanted wakes of WoWLAN devices by group key exchange timeout

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hello, I have a WoWLAN-managed client device in my WLAN (using an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260). Wake on WLAN via magic packet works fine, after Windows v10 x64 has been set to sleep.

But every few minutes, the client wakes automatically without any magic packet. With help of this thread, I tracked the reason down to the group key exchange timeout in the wireless security profile. I have now increased this timeout to 1h (the maximum allowed by ROS) and, indeed, the unwanted automatic wake now occurs after 1h, instead already after a few minutes.

However, this still means a “wake/resume/Windows idle timeout/sleep”-cycle every hour, hardly power-saving! :unamused: I see that increasing the maximum group key exchange timeout from 1h to 1week has already been suggested and requested in this post for another issue. So, I wonder why this is still limited at 1h in the current v6.37rc42? How is WoWLAN supposed to work together with this? :confused: Thanks.

2

I would also like to see the group key timeout be able to be increased to much higher values. I run several APs where almost all the clients are phones, and having them wake up frequently is not good for battery life. 1 hour is better than the 5 minutes default (!) but still there is little reason why the maximum value is 1 hour. I understand it’s important to prevent clients that have left the network from continuing to be able to listen to broadcast traffic, but this is of little security concern for the majority of deployments where the WPA2 passphrase would still be known to the client anyway.