If you have ever carried your laptop from the living room to the home office and noticed it stays connected to the distant living room router with one bar of signal instead of switching to the office extender right next to you, you’ve encountered a roaming issue. How It Works: The Roaming Threshold
Roaming aggressiveness (also called roaming sensitivity or roaming threshold) in Wi‑Fi is a device/driver setting that controls how readily a client (laptop, phone, IoT device) will disconnect from its current access point (AP) and attempt to join a different AP with a stronger or better-quality signal. Higher aggressiveness makes the client roam sooner (at higher received signal strength or smaller quality drop), while lower aggressiveness makes it stay connected longer to the current AP until the signal or link quality degrades further.
After testing thousands of configurations across homes and enterprises, here is the cheat sheet: what is roaming aggressiveness in wifi
When a device moves through a building, its current signal drops. Every device has a built-in roaming threshold. Once the signal drops below that specific dBm threshold, the device initiates a background scan to find a better alternative.
# View current roaming threshold iwconfig wlan0 If you have ever carried your laptop from
The device continuously tracks link quality and tries to switch if even slight degradation occurs.
Mobile operating systems generally do not expose a manual "Roaming Aggressiveness" slider to the user. Instead, they rely on proprietary, hardcoded algorithms. After testing thousands of configurations across homes and
Use iwconfig or wpa_cli to adjust roaming threshold.