Technical Note: Setting Microsoft clients to use VCELL and Native Cell

[mdeparisse_FTNT]

Description

In some situations a wireless client may want to be less aggressive to stay on a dedicated radio.  In such scenario, the driver can be set to scan the available channel less frequently.  In an AD domain, clients may be changed to use fewer scanning slots to save battery life and force the client to stay in the same layer.

In a Native Cell environment the opposite may be required and to set the aggressiveness to the highest value.

One of the issues is that the "RoamAggressiveness"="0" is never at the same place in the registry. So it is necessary to find a way to always find the path and change the key accordingly.

Scope

All Wireless installations could benefit.

FortiWLC and FortiAP.

Solution

Power Shell may be used to remotely set some of the registry keys.

Power Shell to be used for Native Cell best deployment

$nics = Get-ChildItem -path HKLM:\system\CurrentControlSet\control\class -recurse | ? {$_.property -eq 'RoamAggressiveness'}
$nics | Set-ItemProperty -Name RoamAggressiveness -Value 4$nics = Get-ChildItem -path HKLM:\system\CurrentControlSet\control\class -recurse | ? {$_.property -eq 'RoamAggressiveness'}
$nics | Set-ItemProperty -Name RoamingPreferredBandType -Value 2

Power Shell to be used for Native Cell best deployment

$nics = Get-ChildItem -path HKLM:\system\CurrentControlSet\control\class -recurse | ? {$_.property -eq 'RoamAggressiveness'}
$nics | Set-ItemProperty -Name RoamAggressiveness -Value 0$nics = Get-ChildItem -path HKLM:\system\CurrentControlSet\control\class -recurse | ? {$_.property -eq 'RoamAggressiveness'}
$nics | Set-ItemProperty -Name RoamingPreferredBandType -Value 2