Issues roaming to same AP over and over.

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 09:47:48AM -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
> On 01/14/2015 04:00 PM, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> > I'm assuming you have PMF enabled for the network. This looks like a
> > case where a protected Deauthentication frame gets dropped and the AP
> > and STA get out-of-sync in their understand on the association state.
> > wpa_supplicant should be able to recover from this automatically on its
> > own, but if you are forcing new reassociations every 5 seconds, that can
> > prevent that mechanism from working.
> 
> Any idea how long it should take to recover?  And, do you think it could be sped up
> a bit?

That depends on configurable AP behavior, so cannot really do much
unless you control both the STA and AP implementation and configuration.
With default wpa_supplicant and hostapd behavior, it looks like it takes
about 2.3 seconds from receiving unprotected Deauth/Disassoc frame with
status code 6/7 to getting reconnected. STA retries on SA Query took
about one second and similarly, the AP SA Query (which will also get
triggered unless the AP has actually fully lost the association) took
about one second. YMMV with other implementations and if someone changes
AP configuration.
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA