[Prism54-devel] Long timeouts while roaming

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 05:30:52PM +0200, Ulrich Hochholdinger wrote:
> Hi,
> In my setup i experienced long timeouts when the card loses it's
> accesspoint and searches for a new one. 
> 
> Setup is as follow:
> 
> About 60 802.11g Accesspoints from artem in a tunnel-system where mobile
> robots equipped with an 802.11g mini-pci wireless-card (Artem Comcard)
> drive along. 
> 
> System on the robots is Debian woody with kernel 2.4.25 with rtai
> extension. 
> Driver-version of the prism54-driver is v1.2. 
> Firmware version is: 1.0.4.3.
> 
> when the card loses its Accesspoint it lasts for about 14 seconds before
> the new accesspoint is detected. Sometimes it finds the same accesspoint
> again. 
> As workaround, I installed a small script that every second grep the 
> MAC-Adress of the actual accesspoint, and if its 00:00:00:00:00:00 it does 
> an "iwconfig eth1 ap auto". With this Script the timeouts are in about 3
> to 5 seconds.
> 
> So the question is, where do I have to search the problem for these long
> timeouts. Is this hardware-dependend or is the roaming done in the
> driver.
> Or are there any other hints to prevent using such an ugly script.

This is just how the hardware/firmware behaves. I am still not sure --
do you want the card to ASSOC to only one AP or to any available? If you
want it to stick to an AP just set the essid to the essid of the AP you
wan it to stick with. To make it automatically choose the best link, use
`iwconfig eth0 mode Auto`. I auto mode, the hardware/firmware will be in
charge of always looking and ASSOC'ing to the best link.

	Luis

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