Wifi Roaming not efficient on Android devices

[Yann_ROLAND]

Dear All,

We have issues to make work perfectly the roaming when we move inside our building and thus switch from a wifi Access Point (antenna) to another. It is not critical for lot of web apps but when as soon as we use collaborative apps (like MS teams for example), the connection is lost and we are cut for some seconds before the network comes back again and teams recover the audio / video. Are some of you facing the same issue ? 

[Michel]

Hi @Yann_ROLAND ,

For this exact reason, Samsung created an API to change the roaming settings on their devices. This is something than can only be done via the Knox Service plugin and compatible MDM. 

I'm not aware of other brands being able to adjust this setting, I know Ascom has some tweaks build in their firmware but not sure what they adjusted. 

Some customers changed roaming settings on their access point (Cisco is able to do this, among others). But have mixed results, therefore I prefer to adjust this setting on device level. 

[Yann_ROLAND]

Hi @Michel ,

I had a call with Samsung and found interesting infos on the web about these parameters. As we also use KSP, we should be able to set them. My problem is that I have devices in nearly 80 sites WW, some are offices, some factories, others are warehouses so there is not only one kind of implementation for the WIFI. Thus, I'm affraid those parameters could improve things somewhere and break them somewhere else. I understand that we are talking about a very complex thing here. We start to use private 5G, I'm asking myself if this could not solve the issue sometimes.

I'll continue investigating on this, if you have kind of "magic" values to put in the samsung parameters, I'm interested 🙂

[Michel]

Hi @Yann_ROLAND , changing those parameters makes devices room quicker, not sticking with their access point for too long. So it should not have a big impact, unless wifi coverage is an issue on some locations ofcourse. I've never had them break something, it either fixes your issues or it does not fix them, but I haven't had issues where i needed to perform a roll back. 

But I can imagine that you might not want to risk a change on the other side of the world 🙂 

For VoIP, recommended settings are:

Trigger is -70

Delta 6

period 5 seconds

This should give you a good starting point. 

Good luck! 

[Yann_ROLAND]

Hi @Michel ,

We'll try with this settings, we'll see if it is better. Thanks a lot !

Best regards

[Moombas]

We see the same issue sometimes, especially if you use Wifi calling (via app).

In some cases it helped to go to developer mode and turned off Wifi-scan throttling but it's still there (and can't be managed through (our) MDM, so manual setting each device).
Especially if you have switches from one AP to another because you walk through a fire protection door but also it seem not to take the AP with the best signal but trys to hold the connection as long as possible which also seem to be not the best thing always.

Not sure if this is an OEM desgin issue or a general Android behavior issue (works as designed maybe).

[Lizzie]

Hello @Yann_ROLAND, just checking you saw the responses here? 😀

[Yann_ROLAND]

Yes but I just come back from business trip and couldn't answer. I see that there is probably something to improve in android. Next week I've planned to open a ticket to Samsung support to see what we can do. As we also use KSP, maybe we could enable parameters that are improving things on Samsung devices. I'll keep updated the community once I have more technical details on what isbm wrong.

The network director of my company also took the point to discuss this with Cisco, if needed I think we can also open a ticket on this side.

Thanks to all for your answers !

[petterfoo]

We had similar issues with devices loosing connection when roaming between APs.
In our case there was an incompability for 802.11r "fast roaming" between our APs(aruba) and samsung devices.
We turned off fast roaming in the APs and roaming much more stable.

[Yann_ROLAND]

Hello,

Just for info, wifi team is now ensuring all roaming protocols are correctly enabled on all sites. On our end we try to set samsung parameters but they don't seem to be taken into account, we'll manage this with ETS support I think. 

I discussed this with @CoreyC last week in munich, I'm interested to be in contact woth Android peoole whi manage the wifi implementation on devices.

Best regards