Ask HN: How to approach WiFi roaming in a home network

by alufers on 5/18/2021, 11:48 AM with 1 comments

Hi! I live in a pretty big European house (so the walls are brick or concrete). I have installed 4 access points and flashed OpenWrt on them. They all have the same SSID and password set. They are connected to a main router via Ethernet, so there is only one DHCP server and gateway etc.

Unfortunately when walking around my house, smartphones fail to change the AP which means, they stick to the old one even when the signal is unusably weak. Sometimes even stationary devices connect to the wrong AP.

Do you know any way to fix this problem? I have read about 802.11r but the configuration in OpenWrt looks very confusing to me, as I am not really a network guy. (do I need a RADIUS server?), and guides I found online contradict themselves.

Thank you for your answers.

  • by vinw on 5/18/2021, 2:22 PM

    Possibly stating the obvious, but make sure all your access points are on different wifi channels.

    Also I know Unifi have a minimum RSSI setting that kicks off clients to a better AP when signal strength gets low. Maybe OpenWRT has a similar setting although all I found after a quick search for OpenWRT RSSI settings was this thread:

    https://forum.openwrt.org/t/how-to-automatically-disconnect-...