Roaming Assist - Not working right??

[Preskitt.man]

Have an 86U set up as my primary router and a 68U in the back of the house set up as an AP. I have roaming assistant turned on in both routers for both bands (though mainly concerned about 5GHz). Both the 86U and the 68U have the same sets of SSID's. Basically, when I enter the house, I first walk with in a 10 feet of the 86U, and my phone (Galaxy S8) connects to the 86U. If I continue on to the back of the house, even to the kitchen area, my signal from the 86U is down to -70 +/- 5 and the 68U is -50+/- 5. What I want is for the phone to transfer automatically from the 86U to the 68U. I have Roaming Assist on the 86U set to disconnect with values less that -60 dBm. Seems like I should be disconnecting from the 86U and connecting to the 68U. If I turn WiFi off and then on, I get the desired result but would like to do that without that added step. Roaming assist on the 68U is set to -70

Before anyone asks, I can not use AiMesh as I have Merlin installed on both routers and it does not support AiMesh.

 

[Grisu]

you can - others did and are happy!
at least you can give it a try ...
just enable it on master router via SSH, node has to run asuswrt but there is no need for merlin anyhow.

Your clients manage how they get connected!!!
Router can only help them moving, depends on firmware of both sides how good this will work or not.

 

[Preskitt.man]

I'm a little confused. If I wanted to go the mesh route, I would have to have both the master and the node on asuswrt. Right? And then enable aimesh on both the master and the node. I'm not understanding where SSH comes into the picture. If I did go this route, then isn't it the routers control the switching - not the clients.

I don't actually require anything in Merlin over stock, but like it for two main reasons. The lesser one is I like the way you can give your clients a descriptive name. And I prefer the security and the stability of Merlin. I first went to Merlin about 4 years ago after getting my first asus product - the 68U (that is now the AP in my setup). It was not very stable, and I stumbled across Merlin and thought I would give it a try. It gave me the stability that I needed. I would also have concerns that the update schedule for both these systems is not very robust.

 

[Grisu]

not right, but with Merlin on master you can activate it with an easy SSH command.
On nodes this wont be possible but you dont need Merlin on them, just use AsusWRT on nodes an all is fine - best from both worlds ...
Aimesh uses additional features for moving clients.
You have to try it, some like Aimesh and others will say wasted time for their home-network, there are so many dependencies that nobody is able to say if it will work like a charm in your house.

nvram set amas_force=1
nvram commit
reboot

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/rt-ac5300-wireless-info-merlin-and-aimesh.47145/#post-411049

Save your last running config on both routers before you change anything, so you can go back with upload and reboot.

 

[Preskitt.man]

Thanks - didn't know you could do that. About to leave in a few days for a vacation - good project to try when I get back.

 

[miroco]

Roaming Assistant seems to work backwards. Instead of signal strength (a lower numeric negative value indicates a higher signal strength than a higher negative numeric value) its guided by the numeric value.

Adjusting "Roaming Assistant" is like having a carrot on a stick where the stick grows longer instead of shorter. Utterly frustrating.

In the example below it's clear that the candidate is below the threshold, not over.

Jul 2 19:23:51 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -66dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -74dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:51 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:56 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -69dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -73dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:56 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)
Jul 2 19:24:06 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -66dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -70dbm)
Jul 2 19:24:06 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)

 

[RMerlin]

Roaming Assistant seems to work backwards. Instead of signal strength (a lower numeric negative value indicates a higher signal strength than a higher negative numeric value) its guided by the numeric value.

Adjusting "Roaming Assistant" is like having a carrot on a stick where the stick grows longer instead of shorter. Utterly frustrating.

In the example below it's clear that the candidate is below the threshold, not over.

Jul 2 19:23:51 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -66dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -74dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:51 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:56 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -69dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -73dbm)
Jul 2 19:23:56 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)
Jul 2 19:24:06 roamast: discover candidate node [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX](rssi: -66dbm) for weak signal strength client [YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY](rssi: -70dbm)
Jul 2 19:24:06 roamast: roaming reject!!! candidate rssi over threshold(-65dbm)

This looks right to me. Your threshold is -65dB, so those clients at -70 or -73 are weaker than the threshold and should be bumped off. This is a signal strength, not a SNR ratio.

Sent from my ELE-L04 using Tapatalk

 

[miroco]

I think that the problem with roaming occurs in scenarios where the signal strength between two nodes are fairly strong. Homes come in all shapes and sizes and built with different materials. Some of which are less pervious to the WiFi frequency spectrums than others. The "Roaming Assistant" seems more useful in the "big home" scenario, where the drop in signal strength between nodes is more pronounced. The latency of "Roaming Assistant" seems too narrow, leading up to the donkey and two haystacks scenario with the not so big homes.

In other words...

A home where one router is almost enough to provide full coverage, but not quite. With a second router placed in the weak spot of the first, overlapping becomes substantial. If roaming doesn't work in this scenario, you will still be stuck with poor coverage because the weak router won't hand over to the strong router. It seems as if this scenario wasn't on the mind of the engineers when they designed "Roaming Assistant".

An idea, albeit admittedly half-baked, could be an auxiliary function using "Bluetooth Onboarding", taking manual tweeking out of the handoff loop. Since basically all portable and wearable devices are bluetooth enabled and a great number of them are bluetooth low energy (BLE). I'm aware that ASUS AiMesh enabled routers does not come with bluetooth of any kind (the Blue Cave might be the exception). For those interested in the simplicity of setup and usage of AiMesh would a few extra bucks for a usb bluetooth dongle not be a big deal. Over time new bluetooth enabled devices could offer new services. The removal of WPS authentication could be one of the first.

Using Bluetooth for WiFi Onboarding
https://blog.cirrent.com/using-bluetooth-for-wi-fi-onboarding