The camera's are only one hop from the root access point (so I guess that's 2 hops total?). But there are only two access points that are within range, and there is foliage and minor obstructions preventing line-of-sight. Also the distance to the access points is between 100-200 feet depending on which one they associate to (also there is a third AP over 300 feet away, but it rarely connects). The ping response times are all over the place, from 7 ms to hundreds of milliseconds.
The main issue seems to be when it's during a certain time of day and a lot of people walk through the area, and they have phones or ipads which saturate the limited bandwidth. We need to offer public wifi over those same access points (at least they are on a different SSID and a low priority QoS). Still, it significantly degrades the connection quality to the cameras. Then the ping times go in the 100's of milliseconds, with a high drop percentage (up to 50%).
But on a clear day with no people around, the connection quality is enough to maintain a (very delayed but good quality) live video stream.
The second problem is that over time, the camera's stop transmitting video. They are still pingable and I can access their config page. When I do manually open a camera site, the video starts streaming again. It seems the act of connecting to them somehow re-establishes the connection. I would like the controller to be able to do this automatically, though.
Should I set an authentication time-out on that SSID? I have it set to never time-out, since they are live cameras. But would a time-out force the cameras to re-negotiate with the controller and "refresh" the connection?
