What Are Sticky Clients? 802.11k,v,r Explained

[thiggins]

Great article from WiFi Nigel explaining why some devices don't like to move to a better AP (or wireless extender) and what you can do about it.
What Are Sticky Clients? The article also explains 802.11k and v.

This Microsoft Article talks about Windows 10's support for 802.11k,v,r.

Here is Apple's description of iOS support for 802.11k,v,r.

Another Apple roaming reference: Wireless roaming reference for enterprise customers

Mysteries of Wi-Fi Roaming Revealed.
7 Signal whitepaper. Requires submitting name and "organization" but no email.

 

[sfx2000]

Interesting article...

Should note that idle vs. active clients - it's about a 10 dB difference when camping across different AP's - and there's a threshold there before a client will jump...

-70 dBM is a rough number as many clients have different receive sensitive and sleep timelines....

 

[pete y testing]

-70 dBM is a rough number as many clients have different receive sensitive and sleep timelines....

so how does that relate to Roaming assistant in the asus profesional wifi settings

as you can adjust the -70db threshold up or down

 

[sfx2000]

so how does that relate to Roaming assistant in the asus profesional wifi settings

as you can adjust the -70db threshold up or down

It's a challenge, as the RSSI threshold is on the device, not necessarily on the AP, and different devices... so for tuning Asus Roaming Assistant, what might be good for a tablet might not apply for a handset or laptop...

The other challenge, like I mentioned above, is that idle/sleep, the device may camp, whereas having an active application accessing the WLAN, the threshold might step from -70 to -60 (depends on the client implementation).

active/idle handoff is very dependent on how the vendor has implemented things on the device - the AP might be able to help, but again, this is also implementation.

 

[pete y testing]

active/idle handoff is very dependent on how the vendor has implemented things on the device

its a shame those that set the certification havnt force at least some form of uniformity when it comes handoff

 

[joegreat]

Great article from WiFi Nigel explaining why some devices don't like to move to a better AP (or wireless extender) and what you can do about it.

Interesting read, but to it looks like this is simply of our control, right?

In my setup at home, I have a good roaming for 5 GHz clients (due to lower signal levels), but sticky and slow throughput clients on the 2.4 GHz band.

 

[thiggins]

Interesting read, but to it looks like this is simply of our control, right?

In my setup at home, I have a good roaming for 5 GHz clients (due to lower signal levels), but sticky and slow throughput clients on the 2.4 GHz band.

That is typical. More 5 GHz / dual-band STAs have implemented 11v and/or 11k than 2.4 GHz only STAs.

 

[thiggins]

what does really mean sticky here?

Read the article.

 

[Shabbir Rao]

Nice one

 

[Neri123]

I liked the article

 

[paraplu]

What about L2 ARP protocol?
Say you have a switch with two AP's attached. With a mac table update (arp timeout) of, say, 60s. Would this mean the L2 handover could take worst-case 60s?
Just thinking loud.

 

[sfx2000]

@thiggins - sticky clients are a problem no doubt...

Also consider it's evil twin - the client that rapidly ping-pongs between either radios on a dual-band AP, or between AP's in an ESS where multiple AP's are in play - it can run an AP out of resources/memory very quickly, or cause race conditions in the AP or WLC itself.

I've actually seen this first hand... and one ends up with a real problem there...