JoinRequest without Scan ? / Manual scan/roam mode

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 11:52:23AM +0200, Laurentiu-Sorin Paun wrote:

> I am working on a load balancing architecture which allow mobile hosts to know
> about the current load of different access points and to handoff from one AP
> to another in order to have more bandwith available.

> But the scan is a time consuming procedure (between 150 and 400 ms, in
> function of the number of channels scanned and the activity on each of these
> channels), and the JoinRequest (authentication and association) time is only
> about 10-20 ms. Knowing the JoinRequest parameters (MAC addr, channel, Essid),
> would it be possible to on mobile client to do the JoinRequest without
> initiate a scan?

Prism2 does indeed support yet another roaming mode in which automatic
scanning is disabled. I just added support for this into the CVS version
of the driver. I implemented this in a way that allows full control of
the roaming (both scanning and roaming decision) to user space using
Linux wireless extensions. In this way, it is up to the user to decide
whether active IEEE 802.11 scan of all channels is needed or not. One
should even be able to skip all 802.11 scans and use external mechanism
to collect information about neighboring APs.

I wrote some documentation for this feature, so please check README file
in CVS for more information.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA