Hello all. My recent quest to resolve some problems with clients getting logged out of a MT Hotspot when connected to a MT AP (in b mode only)has brought me to research a few of the wireless parameters available in Mikrotik:

1) disconnect-timeout (time; default: 3s) - only above this value the client device is considered as disconnected

2) on-fail-retry-time (time; default: 100ms) - time, after which we repeat to communicate with a wireless device, if a data transmission has failed

3) periodic-calibration (default | disabled | enabled; default: default) - to ensure performance of chipset over temperature and environmental changes, the software performs periodic calibration

I'm curious if anyone changes any of these from their default values.

1 - We notice that some clients get disconnected and reconnected frequently. When I say client, assume a laptop with wireless. I have set this value to 10s on a few APs and it does seem to reduce this connect/reconnect affect to some degree. Are there any disadvantages to setting this higher than 3 seconds? Does it affect the AP performance at all?

2 - This parameter is not all that clear to me. I'm assuming that this is the "window" which an AP has to retransmit before failing. I'm not sure if it affects the AP from disassociating or "dropping" the client, or triggers this process at all. It seems that a higher value than 100ms might cause performance problems with the AP as it will spend more time trying to retransmit. Can anyone clarify this?

3 - We typically enable this feature for MT to MT wireless links. Will this parameter make a client's connection to the AP more reliable? Again, client would be a wireless laptop, not a fixed PTMP CPE connection. Along with this parameter is the periodic-calibration-interval setting - should this ever be changed from it's default setting of 60ms?

Are there any other parameters beyond the basic wireless settings that I might be overlooking or should consider?

Again, I'm looking to increase the reliability of clients connected to a Mikrotik access point. We've got numerous networks based on MT that all show the same symptom: With a MT Hotspot, clients that have a good signal and active connection are getting logged out due to losing their DHCP lease. Upon watching a few of these clients, I'm noticing that their wireless connection is "bouncing" and they are reconnecting to the AP too often, which seems to trigger the DHCP release, which triggers the hotspot to log them out.

Any input, suggestions, or rants would be greatly appreciated

Hi,

Did you ever get any answers to these questions as I would love to know myself.

Regards,

Malcolm

mstead,

I never did get any feedback about these settings. In general, 1 and 2 I leave alone as if these need to be changed, something else is wrong and should be corrected. I turn on calibration for all radios now - it makes sense to use this. Proper power at the radio, reducing/avoiding interference, quality RF parts, and the "magical" ack-timeout parameter are all key to a reliable client connection (as I was seeking in the original post).