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I am now operating a few Cisco AP1252 and Cisco WLC with Intel 4965 client. It is found that the 4965 is very reluctant to roam from the far to the near AP.

1. The roaming action are decided by AP/WLC or client?

2. In WLC, I see that there is a paramater for tuning. Actually, it seems the effect is not obvious.

3. In Intel client, there is a setting "roaming aggressiveness". I tunned this value from "medium" to "high". It seems that the effect also is not obvious. Should it be a figure in dB drop in those high, medium, low value.

Thank you very much for helping.

Cliff.

For myself, sometimes, the firmware of the AP has bugs, it needs to reboot of them to turn some settings on, u tried?
And obviously, the roaming is decided by AP, not us..., and the SSID and the code is same for both AP for your configurations?

1. The roaming action are decided by AP/WLC or client?

In standards based WiFi the client makes the decision to roam.

2. In WLC, I see that there is a paramater for tuning. Actually, it seems the effect is not obvious.

I would not mess with those settings on the WLC on roaming thresholds. That can really, really mess you up. If you want to adjust them, review the deployment guides for what you're trying to accomplish and they might have some recommendations other than the default. Again, clients make the decision to roam, so what real affect would adjusting those parameters have? They are more or less related to AutoRF or the 7920 (their old phone) where there was some infrastructure-based propietary info for the phone.

3. In Intel client, there is a setting "roaming aggressiveness". I tunned this value from "medium" to "high". It seems that the effect also is not obvious. Should it be a figure in dB drop in those high, medium, low value.

Good luck in getting good info on that setting. Manufacturers do such a disservice in putting settings into products/software like that w/out a detailed explanation of what is taken into consideration. Bottom line is that the roaming agressiveness should have some affect on roaming.

Keep in mind, if a client is happy with the connection it currently has it should not likely trigger the roaming algorithm. You get some range out of those 1252s, so how bad is the signal getting before you approach the other one?

I'm laughing at my previous response. Someone just said what do you mean by:

Good luck in getting good info on that setting. Manufacturers do such a disservice in putting settings into products/software like that w/out a detailed explanation of what is taken into consideration. Bottom line is that the roaming agressiveness should have some affect on roaming.

What I mean by the "affect on roaming" I've observed to kick off the roaming process when the RSSI is at say -70dBm versus -80dBm. The default setting is usually pretty good ...lately. In the new Intel proset 12 software they recently released I looked at the adapter settings and they did put some better description on the right-pane. Read what they have to say. ...still vague, but it's better then completely guessing.[/code]

ctam,

We have run into this "sticky client" situation pretty often. We usually disable the support of the 2 lower data rates to help prevent this problem. Disabling the support of those data rates does a number of things. The two most notable effects are outlined below:

(1) The AP transmits the data rates it supports and by disabling the lower two, the client will not longer "hang on" to the last AP it associated too. The lower two rates are exist the farthes away from the AP and if they are not availbe for the client to connect too, the client will have to pick new AP.

(2) The lower data rates not only provide the slower data rates they also take the longest to trasmit. I realize we are talking very small amounts of time, but this time is relative to the AP and it can affect the over all speed each AP can support on the each radio. More specifically, if an AP has a client connected at 1 Mbps and a client at 11 Mbps, it takes 11 times as long to transmit the data from client connected at 1 Mpbs than the other. Sure the other client is connected at "11Mbps," but it has to wait it's turn to send it's information.

Just my $0.02...hope that helps...