Understanding the Roaming Metric

The “Roaming” QoE metric represents the percentage of successful roams between two Access Points for clients within the defined threshold.

A client decides to roam when it detects a better signal from a new Access Point compared to the one it is currently associated with. This behavior is normal, especially for mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.

The threshold (which is the max target time it takes for a client to roam) can be configured from 0.2s to 2s. The default threshold value is 0.2s.

The “Roaming” metric tracks failures depending on the roaming technology used by the client:

• Slow Standard Roams - For PSK and Open Access clients.

• Slow 11r Roams - 802.11r is a standards-based fast roaming technology, supported by Apple iOS devices and some Android devices, that is leveraged when using a secure SSID. Learn more.

• Slow OKC Roams - OKC (Opportunistic Key Caching) is a technique available for authentication between multiple Access Points in a network where those Access Points are under common administrative control. Using OKC, a client who roams to any other Access Point in the network will not have to complete a full authentication exchange, but will instead just perform the four-way handshake to establish transient encryption keys.