Apple Device Roaming

[jeremy_west_564]

I am having a problem with frequent disconnects on apple devices when signal strength is great. In looking into this further, I noticed that the apple devices in question are roaming at an alarming rate. This is happening across iPad, iPod, and MacBook platforms. For example, I looked at an apartment with an iPod touch that was roaming every 30 seconds or so. There is a Win7 laptop in the same apartment that has not roamed one time. I have about 40 Apple devices on the network and similar behavior is happening on 70% of them. I have about 40 other devices on the network and this is not happening with any of them that I have looked at so far. What is more, the Apple devices are roaming out from a nearby AP to an AP several hundred feet away with a few buildings between them. The user is not leaving the apartment but the device is roaming to APs throughout the campus, even APs it either should not see at all, or just barely.

Any ideas? Has anyone seen anything like this before?

[spikes_it]

I have one site with 70+ Mac users (90+ percent Mac) with ZD1100 and five 7363's that is working great! Another site with the same setup with 2AP's that's not. It's quite puzzling.

[sid_sok]

Just to clarify, Enabling SmartRoam on the ZD, does not actually make the client's roaming function any smarter, it only limits the number of APs that will respond to a client's requests.
In theory the fewer the response, most likely from APs that are closer, the better the odds are of it making the correct decision as to which AP to roam to.

The only other thing you can do is to increase the Basic service rate to something higher. 1/6 Mbps on 2.4 GHz and 6 Mbps on 5 GHz can go farther than what is necessary good for data traffic. By increasing the BSS min rate you will effectively decrease the cell size, beacon at 24 Mbps for example will a shorter distance than that going at 6 Mbps, so for any given point in the network that has a BSS min rate of 24 Mbps there are fewer "AP" the client can hear, and of those that a client can hear it can definitely support a higher data rate for non-management traffic. The caution in doing this is that you may create coverage hole in your network. If you do this I would recommend starting from lower rate, 9 Mbps then 12 and so on until you get an acceptable "roaming" by the client and keep it there, then test for coverage holes.

[spikes_it]

Very interesting - we did this a few weeks ago and our 'edges' definitely came in a bit but the disconnects persist.
I'm in the process of dropping the SmartRoam down to 1 upon the advice of TechSupport and we'll test further.

[dtsblake_588878]

IT Scott:

Did the "1" setting solve the disconnects for you?

ThX

[spikes_it]

It helped but the problem still exists.
I also just turned off the DoS protection (under WIPS). It's possible that was preventing clients from reconnecting.