[PATCH 1/1] STA: Reduce the time taken for initial association when FW ROAM is enabled

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 11:28:05AM +0530, Jithu Jance wrote:
> If Driver advertises the FW_ROAM, the supplicant doesn't pass down
> the bssid and freq in the connect req(even though supplicant has these
> info from its scan). This forces the firmware to do a full scan again
> finding out the AP to JOIN. Instead FW can already make use of the scan
> done by the supplicant for the first association. In case if some fw
> doesn't require it, it can just ignore the bssid.
> 
> IMHO, passing down the bssid and freq adds more flexibility and
> will help to improve the connection timings. Please see whether
> the patch is fine.

I agree that it could be useful to provide the initial BSSID/freq hints
to the driver. However, this proposed change is not the way to do that.
It would prevent the driver from doing any roaming by hardcoding a
specific BSSID to be used for the connection. This needs to be done by
introducing new nl80211 attributes for BSSID/freq hints that are then
documented as hints, i.e., as something the driver is free to ignore to
enable roaming within ESS.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA