Google Glass drops with 2500 wireless controller

[jszeinstra]

We are trialing google glass in our healthcare environment and the glasses are dropping connection every 30 minutes network wide for about 10 seconds which breaks the data stream.   Google glass is legacy G only radio and I have ap's with two slots  802.11b/g/n  and 802 and 802.11a/n. 

I've tried going custum mode on the individual ap to lock in a signal strength and channel and it still drops every 30 min. 

Any Ideas?

[shh5455 · Accepted solution]

Sounds like you are getting a session timeout.  Are you using 802.1x and also streaming video?  On the Advanced tab of the SSID, you can increase the session timeout or disable it altogether.

[Leo Laohoo]

Post the config of your SSID.  

What is the firmware of your WLC?  What model of the AP?

[George Stefanick · Accepted solution]

On the WLAN that glass connects to. Go to advance tab and see if session timeout 1800sec is enabled. Turn that off. That is on by default and will death clients every 1800 (30 min) ..

[jszeinstra]

Thanks George,

That was the issue!  I disabled it and the clients are not dropping.  We have multiple SSID's so for the other ones is there some benefit to leaving a timeout?  Is there some buffer that fills up on the AP after a client has stayed connected for an extended length of time?

Really thanks a ton for responding.

Jason Zeinstra

[George Stefanick]

Hey Jason,

There are 2 timers that are of interest to us. 

1) Session timer -- This simply death the client at a set interval. The purpose of this is to rekey MSK/PMK key if doing 802.1X. But, as you seen, it can be disruptive. 

2) Idle Timer -- Found under the controller tab towards the bottom. This timer is 300 seconds (5 minutes). This timer expires clients that haven't sent traffic in 5 minutes. This can be problematic for Apple iDevices because they don't chatter a lot. This becomes more apparent when you have a guest network with a AUP page. A guest user hits the page. Uses the wifi for a few minutes, puts down the iDevice and then 6 minutes later they go to use the wireless and get the popup again. Cisco has a sleeping client as a work around. 

Hope this helps. And thanks a bunch for supporting the rating system ..