Q: Why are users that are inactive or have gone out of wireless range for some period of time getting dropped from active connections of the BSC and have to re-authenticate.
A: Users that are inactive or have gone out of wireless range for some period of time are getting dropped from active connections of the BSC and have to re-authenticate. An example would be a device that has gone into sleep mode or an employee who has taken their laptop with them outside of the wireless coverage area for a lunch meeting.
You can adjust the "Time in seconds before idle connections are timed out" under general>misc>connection tracking. The default is 600 seconds (10 minutes). This means if a client is inactive or goes away for 10 minutes they will be dropped from the BSC's active connection table and have to re-authenticate. You could adjust this to 4 hours for example, 1/2 of a business day. This must be set to greater than or equal to your DHCP lease. If you are using the BSC's DHCP server you can find the DHCP lease under network>managed>click to edit the appropriate managed network interface>DHCP server tab. If you are using DHCP relay make sure the setting is greater than or equal to your DHCP lease time in your external DHCP server. If the BSC does not see the DHCP renew at half the lease interval the client will be dropped from the connections table.
