Is scanning mandatory when doing a SelectNetwork?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 12:33:57PM +0200, Adrien Bustany wrote:
> while analyzing why associating to a wifi network (in open mode, no
> encryption) would take around 2 seconds on my device, I saw that
> (apparently) wpa_supplicant will run a scan (scanning for the specific
> SSID of the network) before initiating the actual association. I was
> wondering if wpa_supplicant could somehow cache the previous scan
> results to avoid this scan operation when associating. Reading the code
> I stumbled on the wpa_bss_add function in bss.c, which looks like it
> could maintain a cache of scan results, however this function does not
> seem to be used anywhere in the code.

It is used and the results are indeed cached.

> Do you know if such a caching would be "legal"? wlancond, the daemon
> used on Nokia devices, seems to maintain such a cache, and association 
> +
> DHCP then takes around 400ms on the same network.

I would not skip the new scan completely since it can cause problems
with some drivers (i.e., anything using cfg80211). However, it would be
possible to limit the new scan to only a single channel if the target
BSS is known. This would speed up the connection quite a bit especially
on dualband cards. This is done in some cases already (e.g., when using
WPS, the channel for the second connection is very likely the same as
for the first connection). select_network case could be extended to do
the same if a matching network is found in the current BSS table.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA