Understanding and Troubleshooting Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Chapter 6

Mobility and Client Roaming

The word mobile, derived from the Latin word mōbilis, means movable. In wireless networking, mobility, or roaming, refers to the ability of a wireless client to move from one access point (AP) to another while maintaining a wireless connection. When a client is onboarded to a Service Set Identifier (SSID), it goes through association, authentication, and IP addressing phases before it can pass traffic. Wireless clients can be predominantly stationary like wireless printers or truly mobile like smartphones. The time taken to onboard a client varies with the security method used and the network latency, and it ranges from a few seconds to several tens of seconds. As the client is onboarded, a set of contextual ...