Client Timeline

The Client Timeline is a great feature that aggregates and analyzes activities of a specific wireless client to provide an intuitive and historical view. With Client Timeline, user can easily know how clients associate, authenticate, and roam among Access Points. It is extremely useful when you need to debug or trace your wireless network. The feature is available at Manage > Client > Client name.

Client States

The EnGenius Cloud AI system categorizes client activities into five different states:

Client was connecting to an AP. Client was roaming and connecting to another AP. Client changed to associate with different radio or SSID of the same AP. Client failed to authenticate with an SSID. Client was denied because of it is in block list.

The states are displayed at the left hand side of timeline. User can easily see how a client transited its states among APs.

Radio Color Conventions

The drawing and content of client timeline follows the color conventions as below:

• Green: represent a 5G session.

• Blue: represent a 2.4G session.

In the right hand side of each session, the system shows the channel, band, protocol, and signal strength of client detected at the beginning of that session.

Transition Details

The communication between wireless client and AP could be very complicated. Different clients with different wifi chips and wireless drivers can behave very differently while communicating with the same AP. The intelligent engine behind Client Timeline is capable of analyzing communication packets effectively and performs clean and human readable transition details for the user.

User can click on the event summary inside a connection session to expand the sequence of transition details:

Table below displays client leave patterns when client leaves each connection session.

Leaving reason	Description
Incorrect password	Client entered the incorrect password for WPA or wrong authentication information for EAP
Client switch to {device_name}/{radio}	When the RSSI signal is not good enough, the client did not disassociated from the AP and it connected to new AP directly with regular authentication procedure.
Roam out to {device_name}	When the RSSI signal is not good enough. The client disconnected from the original AP and connected to the new AP by 802.11r fast roaming protocol.
Steer to {radio}	The client disconnected from the AP due to band steering protocol. It received the 802.11v trigger and connected to suggested band accordingly.
Disconnected by {device_name}	The client was disconnected by the AP due to bad RSSI signal (fast handover).
AP disconnect	The client was disconnected by the AP due to unknown reason.
Kicked by Cloud	The client was kicked by the cloud administrator.
Denied by ACL	The connection was refused by AP because the client was on the blocked list under access control.
Exceed client limit	The connection was refused because the client count has exceeded the maximum 2.4G/5G client limit.
Client inactive	The client was inactive because it was on power saving mode or far away from the AP.
Client disconnect	The client disconnected because the user disabled the Wi-Fi or choose to connect to other AP.
Disconnected due to SSID configuration change	The clients was disconnected due to SSID configuration change. Some configuration change took effect only after recycled (down&up) the NIC (network interface controller). When the NIC is down, all connection are disconnected.