I'm looking for some thoughtful comments on how to definitively get to the bottom of this issue that I'm having. A little background info:
This is a warehouse setting, with a convoluted layout: Many different spaces, subdivided by block walls, coolers, racking systems through some spaces. Users move around on forklifts constantly. The wifi equipment on these forklifts in many cases is 15 + years old, so they don't have much of the modern wifi capabilities. The prior wifi system was motorola WiNG controller with various motorola and symbol AP's. To keep cost down, our goal was to just do a 1 for 1 swap of the AP's for newer ones in preparation for them getting new client hardware and hopefully upgrade security.
What we've put in is a mix of AP410C and AP510CX's in the same spots the prior AP's were. My thinking was that we'd use the old WEP encryption because that was the max the old system supported, and it worked well for 15+ years. But the new AP's didn't support that properly. So we were forced to upgrade to WPA2.
All client devices were able to support WPA2 and initially got everything to work. What did start happening was reports of timeouts fairly frequently. What I started to notice was that the ML stuff was throttling the radio on some devices down to minimum in some cases. This would end up causing a situation where two adjacent ap's were on the same channel, one at full blast and one a minimal. I forced some of those AP's that had their radio throttled down to stay at a higher level, and that fixed the channel mixture for the most part, but the comment today was that these devices feel like as they move, they're hanging onto the farther AP's for longer. I'm not certain. That might be the case. It's not clear to me how to test that rigorously.
I'm looking for anyone who can point me in the right direction in terms of troubleshooting this and solving. It seems likely accurate that there's some issues of waiting too long to swap to the louder AP. But I'm not certain. What blows my mind is that with the older AP's they ran at max radio power all the time, every one, and they never had any of these issues. I thought there was no way I was going to have these issues with more modern hardware and software. Maybe it's a feature of the WPA2 protocol vs the lighter WEP?
Any input/troubleshooting suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
