2022-05-29 - more on WiFi roaming

almost exactly one year ago i wrote about WiFi romaing. it workes nice ever since, but i've notice it's a bit difficult to get just the right TX power setting, to make all clients eager to switch over. the problem is that in real life there is a huge difference in how well given device receives WiFi. eg. my laptop was still able to I/O most of the packages throughout the entire house, while cell phone was loosing signal 2/3 down the way.

i was wondering how could i make the WiFi roaming a bit more “aggressive” in roaming clients? it turned out to be tricky, as it's essentially a client feature. however in OpenWRT there is a nice way of “helping” clients to make the right call – “coverage cell density”. what it (effectively) does is it does not offer lower speed rates. this in turn forces clients that are further away, to switch over, as they can no longer I/O at high speeds! so client has to switch, even though connection would still be usable at degraded speeds, normally. after enabling that option, all my clients start switching over exactly as expected, where expected.