Client Management

With Client Management, Wi-Fi clients are steered to the best available access point and frequency band. This feature improves the quality of wireless networks of all sizes—whether they operate stand-alone or orchestrated by the LANCOM Management Cloud. The popular band steering and client steering, which so far were separate features, have now been combined and even operate without a WLAN controller.

Compared to the previous client steering feature supported by WLCs, Client Management operates independently and without a WLC. The access points communicate with one another using the protocol IAPP.

Important: For the access points to communicate with one another, they need to be able to exchange IAPP messages. IAPP messages are transmitted by multicast. If necessary, the infrastructure—and switches in particular—requires exemptions to be created for IGMP snooping or other filtering mechanisms. IAPP uses the multicast group 224.0.1.76.

Note: LANCOM switches in the default setting are already set up correctly for Client Management.

In this way Client Management ensures that clients are evenly distributed across the frequency bands and access points to optimize overall WLAN performance. A requirement for this is that the WLAN modules and access points in a broadcast domain all transmit on the same SSID.