Wireless network woes: The problem of "sticky clients"

June 25, 2019 1:13 PM

I just bought 14 new access points (APs) to upgrade the wireless network at my workplace, but the “upgraded” network is no better than the original – and might actually be worse. I’m starting to fear that I need to buy a whole new system altogether.

I work for a small non-profit organization. We want to start using cell phones and iPads to access cloud apps throughout the building, and the staff will be moving around the building a lot. I recently bought 14 of these APs: Open Mesh A62. They replaced the older Open Mesh OM2P units that we had been using. The older network wasn’t great, but we weren’t using it for any important business applications, so it didn’t matter much.

I’m running into a roaming issue which I think is caused by “sticky clients”. A person’s phone connects to an AP, and then as the person moves around the building, the phone stays connected long after the signal quality degrades to the point of being useless. To fix the problem (temporarily), you have to manually shut off WiFi on your phone, and then turn it back on again. This step forces your phone to connect to the closest AP, so you get a good network connection. Then, when you walk to another location in the building, the signal degrades again, and you have to repeat the process.

I am able to control the transmit power of the individual APs. I’m not sure, but I think the problem was somewhat alleviated by reducing the power level, as recommended here. Nevertheless, roaming is still not working well. (Actually, part of my problem is that there is no easy, reliable way for me to determine whether any given change has improved performance. I'm forced to walk around with my iPhone, running an app that continuously pings Google's DNS server at 8.8.8.8).

I need to get this fixed, even if it means selling the existing equipment on eBay and getting hardware that is more optimized for roaming. However, I’d like to save this option as a last resort.

I’ve opened a trouble ticket with the manufacturer, but they have not offered any useful advice. In fact, I think the tech doesn’t know about sticky clients, and he says that everything looks good to him when he looks at the management portal.

Any thoughts on whether I can make this work?

posted by alex1965 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I am definitely not a network engineer, but have you tried enabling 802.11k and 802.11r? I think those two standard were meant to help with roaming (though the client has to support it) and it looks like Open Mesh/Datto does have a support page about it.
posted by Fortran at 1:34 PM on June 25, 2019

I've run into similar trouble in the past, and successfully dealt with it via minimum RSSI and beacon rate settings on the APs. (Discussed toward the end of your "sticky clients" link.) This strategy may or may not work for your site and/or hardware, but it did the trick for me.
posted by sportbucket at 1:44 PM on June 25, 2019

you have to lower the radio power on the AP's and adjust the RSSI ratios on the AP's to help make the clients "decide" to roam before they get too far away from the AP. Implementing 802.1x can help because in my experience, IOS-based mobile clients in the past seemed do better to keep an array of all the BSSID's associated to the SSID but really, using WPA-PSK should accomplish the same thing just as well depending on the client type.

Also, are you using a wireless lan controller to manage the AP's, or just a bunch of AP's configured in autonomous mode with the same SSID on each? Having a wireless lan controller that all the AP's associate with helps tremendously as well.
posted by nikaspark at 3:47 PM on June 25, 2019

Response by poster: @nikaspark: Unfortunately, the Open Mesh system doesn't allow for a wireless LAN controller. So the APs are all autonomous.
posted by alex1965 at 3:54 PM on June 25, 2019

what's the square footage you're in? 14 AP's can be a lot of AP's or very few...Also can you look into client configuration services that allow you to further tune client wireless radio behavior?
posted by nikaspark at 9:15 AM on June 26, 2019