cisco dna and wired / wireless handoff

[patkeiman95]

So I've been told that Cisco DNA (or "software defined campus") has ways to do wired/wireless handoff, so that you could seamlessly transition from a wired connection to a wireless one without dropping traffic. Supposedly this works because it can recognize the client and maintain the existing overlay connection to it. I'm somewhat skeptical as in the end it seems to me to be a client-based problem: the client has two adapters and needs to switch over from one to the other. That action would be handled by the resident OS. Does anyone here know how Cisco DNA handles this process? And does it work properly?

[ChuckMcF]

We have wireless in some buildings/areas on our network. If you are on the wired SDA network and want to switch to the wireless SDA network, as long as you are in range of the AP the transition from wired to wireless will drop no more than 3 pings and in most cases only maybe 1. Our "SDA Wireless" network is not actually 100% SDA yet which I am told is even faster (likely no loss as you mentioned). The APs connect to an SDA NAD (switch) and the traffic tunnels (OTT) to the WLC which sits on the Legacy network. Authentication to the wired or wireless network is still handled by ISE (of course) via RADIUS and that process is very quick. We authenticate to the network via computer and user certificates and, as mentioned previously, the transition between networks usually nets 1-3 lost pings.

Consider your home network (non-SDA I'd assume) - if you were on a wired connection and transferred to wireless that process would be fairly seamless as well. I think whatever OS you use will transition between the networks fairly quickly as long as you don't need to enter your credentials. The same holds true in SDA for the client. The credentials, in our case user&comp cert, do not need to be entered again when transitioning between networks but they are checked via RADIUS as the transition happens.

I hope this is helpful,

Chuck McFadden

[jalejand]

Wired to Wireless handoff, you mean, a client disconnects from the wired network to onboard the wireless network?
That will require association+authentication on the wireless side, SDA fabric control plane won't save a cache of authentication nor association mechanisms for wireless.