Assisted Roaming for Non-802.11k Clients
It is also possible to optimize roaming for non-802.11k clients. You can generate a prediction neighbor list for each client without the client requiring to send an 802.11k neighbor list request. When this is enabled on a WLAN, after each successful client association/reassociation, the same neighbor list optimization is applied on the non-802.11k client to generate the neighbor list and store the list in the mobile station software data structure. Clients at different locations have different lists because the client probes are seen with different RSSI values by different neighbors. Because clients usually probe before any association or reassociation, this list is constructed with the most updated probe data and predicts the next AP that the client is likely to roam to.
We discourage clients from roaming to those less desirable neighbors by denying association if the association request to an AP does not match the entries on the stored prediction neighbor list.
Similar to aggressive load balancing, there is a switch to turn on the assisted roaming feature both on a per-WLAN basis and globally. The following options are available:
- Denial count—Maximum number of times a client is refused association.
- Prediction threshold—Minimum number of entries required in the prediction list for the assisted roaming feature to be activated.
Because both load balancing and assisted roaming are designed to influence the AP that a client associates with, it is not possible to enable both the features at the same time on a WLAN.
