On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 18:03 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote: > How does this work in practice? > > If my laptop/phone/whatever moves between zones, will it automatically > switch to the strongest signal (even if it still has a weak connection > to the AP it started with), or will it need to actually lose one > signal before it looks for another one?
in practice it "just happens" with the exact mechanism down the client and access point software/firmware I guess. It certainly doesn't drop out and look for another access point, as I would imagine it sees them as part of the same network with the same SSID etc but different MACs (the whole process AIUI is at the MAC layer level). I don't think it picks the best signal either but will initiate a "hand off" to another AP if the signal degrades too much. 802.11f added some better management of the process to the original minimalist requirements of 802.11b. http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa/pubs/handoff-lat-acm.pdf explains in detail, if you search for " wireless AP handoff 802.11g " you'll get an afternoon's reading ;-) Phil _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
