# [Solved kinda] How can I load-balance our Wifi Network?

## ChojinDSL

Hello fellow gentooers.

I've been researching this subject, but I'm still not sure how to do this.

In our Office, we currently have to Wireless Access Points, with SSID AP1 and SSID AP2, each in different parts of the office, so that we have a wifi signal everywhere.

Each client in our office is configured to connect to either automatically using WPA2 encryption. So far so good.

Both wireless access points are connected via cable to our LAN.

However, this is still far from ideal. Since once a client is associated with a particular access point, they will stay connected to that Access Point regardless of available Bandwidth or number of connected Clients, until they loose the connection and have to re-associate.

I was wondering, is there a way to kind of create a sort of WIFI cluster, so that there is only one SSID which everyone uses, and the hardware intelligently distributes traffic and clients dependant on load, bandwidth, signal quality, etc.

I've been looking into setting up our APs with WDS. But as I understand it, that just makes them act as repeaters, which means that our Wireless Bandwidth gets reduced.

Wireless Bridging on the other hand is meant to bridge to separate LANs between to wifi routers.

Is there any affordable technology which can accomplish this?

How do large corporate environments usually handle wifi?

*****edit*****

 :Embarassed: 

Ok, seems at least part of what I had intended was a lot easier than I thought.

Simply make sure both Access Points have the same SSID, and IF they are close to each other, make sure they have channel numbers far enough apart so that they don't overlap. And thats pretty much it.

The clients will now automatically roam and not drop the connection.

This seems to results in seamless roaming based on your signal strength.

It would be nice to implement a sort of load balancing system among the wireless nodes, so that there is optimal usage of bandwidth. But I guess that would probably require a different class of wifi access points, i.e. much more expensive than the ones we have at the office.

On the other hand, roaming was truly seamless. At least on my laptop. I was pinging google the whole time and walked from one end of our office to the other, while watching my system logs for any change in wireless activity. The connection never broke off and my logs simply noted that I roamed from one AP to another.

In retrospect, most of you probably where already aware of this "feature", so....   :Embarassed:   :Embarassed:   :Embarassed: 

Oh well, learn something new every day.

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## richard.scott

Does your network provide DHCP for the AP's or do the AP's run DHCP and provide a different IP range depending on which range you connect to?

If its the latter, you could have dropped connections when moving form one IP range to another.

We have it setup with one SSID and DHCP provided by the LAN to avoid this.

Rich.

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## ChojinDSL

The APs only accept a wireless connection, the actual dhcp is handled by our router/dhcp/firewall/proxy server on the lan.

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## richard.scott

If DHCP is handled by the network and not the AP's give all your AP's the same SSID and encryption code but have them on different channels.

Also, make sure the channels don't overlap, see this for an explanation.

http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor_wlanchannels.html

You will also need to keep your mac filter list the same on each AP if your doing MAC address filtering.

Rich.

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## ChojinDSL

Yeah, thats pretty much what I've implemented now. I was just wondering if there was any way to do some "intelligent" load balancing.

As it stands now, clients will roam automatically between APs depending on signal strength.

However, some clients are located right in between to APs, so they can reach both equally well. For cases like that it would be a nice feature to be able to determine which of the APs has less load, so that a client can connect to the less crowded one.

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