With Flavien Richard
Welcome to the Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn and ask questions about 802.11 radio, MIMO, new APs, antennas and antenna placements, as well as outdoor requirements and Mesh with Cisco Expert Flavien Richard. Enterprise Mobility requires planning, understanding of the evolving environment, and a good knowledge of the equipment that are installed to properly serve the needs of your workforce, contractors and visitors. This session focuses on understanding the often overlooked Radio Frequency part of designing and deploying a Wireless LAN Network including complex and challenging environments.
Flavien Richard is a technology solutions architect in the Borderless Networks team in France. He is an expert in wireless and mobility topics and servers as an escalation point of contact in the European theater. This gives him visibility over most of the biggest projects in EMEA. He is a technical interface between the Wireless business unit and Cisco customers, partners, and employees to help define and prioritize the new features and products for the mobility market. He is a frequent speaker and session manager at Cisco Live and other Cisco events on mobility. He also was a contributor to the writing of the first Wireless CCIE exams.
Remember to use the rating system to let Flavien know if you have received an adequate response.
Flavien might not be able to answer each question due to the volume expected during this event. Remember that you can continue the conversation on the Network Infrastructure sub-community discussion forum shortly after the event. This event lasts through November 2nd, 2012. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other community members.
Hi Misscat.
This is usually a client feature, more than a Wireless infrastructure feature. Here is, for instance, a picture from Intel ProSet utilities:
Quite a few clients supplicants let you do this on computers.
I am trying to look into a trick to make it potentially work from the Infrastructure, but so far, from the infrastructure, I don't have a quick knob to change in order to get this specifically to work as you want it.
Nevertheless, let's understand how a client decides to roam (handover) from one AP to the next.
[By now, I have read that the client is an iPhone, so, you cannot benefit from the previous recommendation]
A client decides to roam because there is a better signal at some point in the scanning result for the available APs on this SSID. The best way to (mostly) prevent a device to roam is to have a clear difference in favor of one AP signal strength over the others.
This can be done by:
1) changing the AP location to a closer location, or to a place where you have clearer line of sight from the clients(sometimes, changing the AP placement to the middle of a corridor instead of at a corner, for instance, solves issues) or play with antenna orientation,
2) move to a 802.11n AP instead of 802.11a/g AP, because of Client explicit beamforming (otherwise known as ClientLink) like 1142 or 1262, which both work with your 4402-25 if you use 6.0.202 (MD) or 7.0 softwares,
3) dive into the RRM (Radio Resource Management) logs to see if the unwanted roaming is not happening at the same time as a recalculation of DCA and TPC events,
4) override some RRM parameters like setting the Transmit Power to a higher fixed number so that you have a clear differentiation of Signal Strength to a special AP (this should be the last resort option, but can be done if you cannot move the AP around) compared to the other APs in that neighborhood.
Hope this helps,
Flavien.
