Roaming and association issue on Wireless

[john_of_rohanne]

I'm quite new when it comes to Mesh Access Points, especially when using them with standard Access Points. We have an area onsite whereby at the bottom of the yard we have a root access point on the corner of the shed, and two Mesh access points near enough centre at the bottom of the yard. Further up the yard about over halfway to the other end we have an Access Point on the end of the roof for the shed (same shed that the Root AP is connected to further down). At the other end of the yard we have 3 Access Points on the fenceline.

The standard APs are 1832I and the Mesh/Root APs are 1562I.

The issue we've got is that I can walk from the bottom of the yard with the Root/Mesh APs to the top of the yard with the standard APs, and the connection doesn't drop. When I walk back down the yard I reach halfway and the connection becomes Limited, but eventually the connection restores another 10 feet further down. I reach quarter of the way back and the connection is Limited again. I walk over to the two Mesh APs and my phone will not associate with these APs. As soon as I disconnect/reconnect, the device associates and I'm connected again.

This issue originally affected several Thor Honeywell VM3 devices and now today, my phone which is a Samsung S20 FE. I had the Sidekick connected the entire time and the issue doesn't appear to be signal related. I feel as though I wasn't able to roam from the standard AP to the Mesh AP without disconnecting first.

I suspect that the client devices are not able to roam between standard APs and Mesh APs, but this seems rather odd, so am I missing something here?

[Arshad Safrulla]

What is the WLC model? Code running? Did you do a debug client or RA trace? What mode the RAP and MAP is in? 

Which band is used for backhaul? Was a site survey conducted before deploying the solution to decide the RF parameters to configure or at least after the issue has been noticed?

[Tony Rosolek]

What kind of security is used? WPA2-Enterprise, WPA2-Personal, Open?

In general roaming is client decision and not triggered by the infrastructure. If you have a Sidekick you could capture on the channels of the Mesh AP client radios. There you could see if your client sends Probe Requests and gets Probe Response from the Mesh APs. Also you could see Authentication traffic. 

It might make also sense to check the log of the WLC if you see any authentication or other errors. 

[john_of_rohanne]

Later investigations found that the 5GHz wasn't broadcasting and 2.4GHz is on a low power level due to the amount of interference it can see. Took a bit of time to find this issue, but your messages definitely helped with my investigations.