Forcing clients into 2.4 or 5 GHz band

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 12:23:45AM +0200, Robert Senger wrote:
> Instead of requiring the users to set their device to 2.4 or 5 GHz only,
> I would like to force the clients into 5 GHz network server side. 
> 
> The only way I've found to do this is to put the mac address of the
> Android clients into a deny_mac_file and add this option to the 2.4 GHz
> configuration file (to force them to use 5 GHz).
> 
> This is not very elegant, so I would like to ask if there is a better
> way to do this.

There is not any completely robust approach for this, but this is an
area that has some work going on that will hopefully make it easier to
do this reliably in the future. The main issues with currently deployed
devices are that the AP does not really always know whether the station
supports multiple bands (that is not clearly identified by most, if not
more or less all, deployed stations) and there is no generic means for
the AP to steer the station to another BSS in a way that would work with
all deployed stations.

I added some basic framework to hostapd to enable more experimentations
for this. These are far from perfect, but anyway, suitable for testing.

http://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=a65a9b8d677b5b3ed9a77f5fe3a3fa6bc34e5d32
http://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=964f64e2eebef06c7fab5c51f79ebc821e00b25e
http://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=0e2412d0864f0323e0d560edc024421bfae0b8bd
http://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=b308a304d4289a0d9cf4f003ae8fa7aeba8c6b45
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA