SonicOS 7.1 Access Points

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Technical Documentation > SonicOS 7.1 Access Points > Settings > Creating/Modifying Provisioning Profiles > 5GHz/2.4GHz Radio Advanced Settings for Provisioning Profiles > Configuring IEEE802.11k Settings for Dynamic Radio Management

Configuring IEEE802.11k Settings for Dynamic Radio Management

The IEEE802.11k Settings section of the 5GHz or 2.4GHz Radio Advanced screen provides the Enable Neighbor Report option. Enabling this option makes the access point collect radio measurements, as defined by the IEEE802.11k amendment to the 802.11 standard.

The Neighbor Report request is sent from a client to an access point. The access point returns a Neighbor Report containing information about neighboring access points that are known candidates for the client to reassociate with (should the client choose to do so). Therefore, the Neighbor Report request/report pair enables the client to collect information about the neighboring access points of the access point it is currently associated to, and this information might be used as identification of potential candidates for a new point of attachment while roaming.

The benefits of the neighbor/request report are:

  • Speeds up scanning – Instead of the client engaging in time-consuming scanning activity (either actively probing for access points or passively listening to every channel for beacons), the client can instead narrow its list to the known available neighbors. This is especially useful in high-density environments where multiple WLANs can be heard by the client

  • Reduces client power consumption – The time taken by scanning (especially active scanning) also consumes battery power for the client. As the neighbor report provides information before roaming, less power might be consumed

  • More efficient use of WLAN air time – Active scanning is not only time consuming from the perspective of client resources (such as CPU, memory, radio), it's also air-time consuming. For example, a client that is not neighbor-aware likely engages in so-called wild card probe requests (some clients burst these). In this scenario, typically every access point that hears the probe request generates a probe response. In other words, for a single client, N number of access points generate N probe responses. If multiple clients engage in wild card probing, then the RF environment can quickly become polluted with management traffic simply because the clients are not using neighbor request. This has a negative impact for the entire WLAN.

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