WiFi Roaming

tom here from lauren systems and i am roaming around the office so i can show you a video about wi-fi roaming if you look over here at this tool i'm using called wavemon you'll see the mode manage connected to and you'll see the mac address of the different access points that it's transitioning to now i'm going to be doing this demo with unify and it's not specific to unified though this is a generalized video that dives into the different methodologies and how roaming works and how to optimize it for your network during this little intro here i have now wandered through three different access points and switched three different times and you can see the ping is consistent so we're going to talk about how that works how 802.11r works and whether or not 802.11r is right for you before we dive into the details let's first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you'd like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like 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standard is really important and let me explain the client makes and has the biggest influence in where it connects to it looks at the scanning of the networks around it it looks at the ssid it's associated with and says hey there's that same ssid but it's a signal that is stronger and i'm just going to go over there it is constantly conflated with calling it meshing and things like that but it specifically is called roaming meshing is something different and what i mean by that is the ability for your device your client to roam from like this access point here to another access point in the office is very much a client decision now these do influences and that's the part we're going to talk about but it is important that the client has full support and i bring this up because well if you're doing a lot of corporate networks you'll find a lot of oddball devices and even though they may have been made after the 802 11r adoption in 2008 in a revision in 2012 and you're like but this device was made in 2018 it should completely support it anyone who spends time in the corporate world realizes well some of these weird devices and special oem devices are not always built on complete following of standards therefore this is where the first problem you run into is now for home users they're usually on an issue at all because most home users i know have a lot of modern devices they have their phones and their laptops that are relatively new and the sanders been around a while so they fully support it and they will roam seamlessly between these networks now i'm not going to dive through but leave you links of course so you can read through the 80211r standard and i think there's a good article right here i'll leave a link to on wi-fi fast roaming simplified and it breaks down some of the details the too long didn't read is there is an eight-step process they break down for how you authenticate to an access point now with 802.11r that only has to happen on the first access point every subsequent in the same grouping of devices access point that you have can do a four-step process because once you authenticate to the first access point it can automatically skip those steps going we've already authenticated you we're going to let you associate here this allows that fast transition for roaming which is outstanding it's how i was able to walk without any ping delays going from device device device was with this turned on once they authenticate to the first one it just passed me off to the other ones very seamlessly now it still works if you don't have fast roaming it can re-authenticate and in 2020 most modern devices authenticate relatively fast but that is further complicated by two things one if you're using wpa psk yes it does work with that if you're using something more advanced radius or other authentication methods where there's a server and authentication service got to be passed along to him behind that actually becomes more important to use something like 80211r for seamless transitions because it does work for both it has to do that more complicated authentication each time that could create a real problem and cause a delay now let's dive a little bit deep i said this is more or less platform agnostic but i'll show you where the settings are inside of unifi but you can find equivalent settings in almost any of the modern wi-fi devices wi-fi access points unify lists fast roaming as beta this is them favoring the corporate networks that well they know have a lot of strange devices and they turned it on by default more people would have problems because these devices not completely supporting it as i said in the beginning but as i said for most home users and devices or networks that have a lot of modern devices turning it on i've generally not found any problems it's not absolutely necessary and this is the fast roaming overview just like the network world article it breaks down by turning this on how the transition happens before a bss transition the transition process and how that process is simplified by turning it on basically the authentication i talked about there pretty straightforward then is the other option and this is really important too and that's the bss transition frames once again it has to be supported by the client these unify access points such as the one next to me does support this and they have a list of which ones do which most of the modern ones all have the support but bss transition when a device has a weak signal the uap will send bss transition frame instead of a disconnect frame for the client now that option when you create a unified network is right here allow bss transition with wnm and what those are is management frames that are sent to say hey your signal's weak you should go somewhere else and it's a soft ask if there's not somewhere else to go it's not going to go versus a let's just disconnect because if we the client clearly doesn't want to transition we're just going to kick it off the network and it should bounce over to here these are a couple different ways that this transition happens when there's something else to transition to now there's one more thing that's really important as well and that is the often misunderstood rssi and signal strength and people assume they want to start tuning these so when you have the device and you say hey i want to kick people off when they don't have a signal because if they transition to the other device you're going to have a better time and it's going to be a better and faster wi-fi experience and why won't my client switch so this is where we go into switching the rssi now this is a place where i see people getting themselves into lots of trouble and what do i mean by that they set these minimums that are unrealistic that they either connect fast or not at all and they do have some recommendations in here and they've actually added some warnings for people who set this wrong so much of our consulting work is fixing when people started monkeying with all the settings instead of leaving them at auto i rarely ever have to actually set this because it isn't as necessary as people think but if you have designed a network and you really want them to always the clients that are connecting to be on the fastest one you can carefully tune this and troubleshoot this what this does is sets a minimum standard by which the access point will allow a client connect so if the signal is too weak sorry you can't hang out here the signal's too weak go somewhere else the problem becomes if i have an access point here and we'll just pretend this is an access point so i can grab another one and i want it to go to whichever one is the closest that works what if i'm over here and there's not a closer one well now you know let's say you're just on the edge of this access point outside it keeps kicking you off because it says your signal doesn't meet the minimum and this is sometimes a problem and wi-fi is well challenging at times because of all the different materials it does or does not pass through and it can create a lot of problems so my best recommendation is only use this as absolutely necessary and look for other methods such as proper placement of wi-fi and proper distance between them and even turning down i know it sounds backwards turning down the access point power if necessary so you have a little bit less overlap so it chooses the right one and that's another tuning option in terms of you know when you're thinking about these make sure the channels aren't overlapping make sure the power bands don't completely overlapper yet you're going to confuse the device as to which one it needs to go to so as far as turning this on it's pretty safe generally speaking to have fast roaming turned on provided you have a lot of modern devices and they have properly followed the standards that have been out for a while and implemented them in each device even without that on as i said with the bss transition and this is specific to uh unifi which comes with this default turned off yes it will still transition it's the same thing with a lot of other access points as well i just don't have everyone set up here as a demo so hopefully this helps you understand a little bit better how the roaming works i will leave links to each of these so you can read a little deeper the network world article dives a little bit deeper into the topic overall but i'll the unifi ones and if you look up cisco in the same kind of search terms of how bss and fast forwarding works in cisco or any of the other popular devices almost every company every major company has a write-up on how it works and where the options are for their devices all right i'll leave links below and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 51,211

Keywords: lawrencesystems, wifi roaming, wifi roaming between access points, wifi roaming explained, wifi roaming setup, roaming, wifi, wireless, router, access point, ap, technology, mesh, mesh wifi, wi-fi, cwnp, wlan roaming, ssid

Id: gf4XuGK4N5Q

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020