With UniFi Network 9.2.87, Ubiquiti is starting to rollout a new WiFi feature called Roaming Assistant. This feature is intended to help 'encourage' wireless clients to roam to other access points by utilising BSS transition frames.
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How do devices know when to roam?
Typically, with modern WiFi clients, decision to roam to another access point or BSSID is pretty much down to the individual client. Certain vendors have specific RSSI thresholds in place when devices start to scan for other BSSIDs. For example, Apple publishes a table with device types and dBm levels and this can vary from -70 dBm to -75dBm depending on device.
There are certain tricks and tools we can utilise in order to 'encourage' wireless clients to roam to other access points, such as Minimum RSSI, Fast Roaming and more, such and Band Steering (although this is achieving a different goal).
BSS Transition is also enabled by default in UniFi and is recommend to be left enabled.
While these tools can be helpful in certain scenarios, there is no replacement for proper cell coverage and overlap.
What about Minimum RSSI?
Minimum RSSI has been around in UniFi for a very long time. It's approach to moving clients around to other APs is essentially a hard kick from the AP and forcing the client to reassociate with another one that offers a better signal level.
However, this approach is only recommend to be used by Ubiquiti in high density deployments and might result in performance or experience issues when using real time applications, such as VoIP.
What is Roaming Assistant?
Roaming Assistant is still a band-aid approach to solving roaming issues, but it is achieving it in a more supported way. For example, while Minimum RSSI is classed as a hard kick, Roaming Assistant is more of a soft kick.
By utilising BSS transition frames to let the clients know that they will be dropped from the access points when they hit a certain RSSI level, it can look for another AP in good time and use standardised BSS transition mechanisms to move to another AP.
Ubiquiti say that this approach is tolerated better by modern WiFi devices.
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