Notes:
1.
Where to place the WS & AP?
The Access Points need not be directly
connected to the Switch to be managed by it; besides, the wireless switches
need not be directly connected to each other to form a peer network. However, it
is necessary that all the Switches and the Access Points are a part of the same
Local Area Network. In other words, the Wireless Switch can not manage APs
located across a Public Wide Area Network (internet), especially across a NAT
device.
2.
About WPA2 Enterprise Authentication:
The solution also supports
authenticated fast roaming using WPA2 Enterprise authentication in addition to
other mechanisms. But, this is not currently supported by most of the wireless
voice clients which only support WEP. Moreover, the newer versions of Windows
XP Clients do support WPA2 but demonstrating L3 Fast Roaming with Windows
Clients is not recommended to highlight seamless roaming as Windows Clients
are inherently slow in managing hand-offs.
The
Configuration Guide
indicates demonstrating roaming between the APs by
powering down one of the APs thus forcing the clients to “roam” to the second
AP. However, it must be noted that this is really a “
fail-over
” and not really
roaming. In particular, when using WPA2 Enterprise for authentication, when an
AP is powered down and brought back again, it loses the dynamic key
information previously received from the switch causing the client who roams to
that switch to re-authenticate itself from the Radius server. Although, none of
these induced delays are more than a few milli-seconds and users would only
see the loss of one ping, it must be pointed out that in real roaming under these
delays would not exist. In the lab testing, we have recorded clients roaming with
a hand-off time of 23 milli-seconds which is too quick to be noticed by a user.
