Campus users report a poor wireless experience. An engineer investigating the issue notices that in high-density areas the wireless clients fail to switch the AP to which are automatically…

Load balancing distributes clients based on association count and band select steers dual-band clients to 5 GHz, but neither feature uses RSSI thresholds to detect or correct clients that fail to initiate roaming.

Optimized Roaming is a Cisco WLC feature that sets a minimum RSSI threshold - when a connected client's signal drops below that value, the controller sends a disassociation frame, prompting the client to re-associate with a nearer, stronger AP. This mechanism directly addresses high-density sticky client problems without requiring any client-side configuration changes.

Layer 3 roaming maintains IP address continuity for clients moving between subnets on different controllers, but does not address the root problem of clients refusing to initiate the roam in the first place.

Layer 2 roaming describes clients moving between APs within the same subnet and mobility group, which is a roaming type classification rather than a feature that detects or corrects sticky client behavior.