Mobile Laptop Continuous Connection through wireless network

Hi all,

I have a Dell Latitude D620 running their standard 1390 WLAN b/g Mini-Card. I am doing some experiments at a college campus that has complete b/g wireless coverage, this requires me to move to different locations all over campus with the laptop. I am controlling other devices over the network through the wireless laptop connection. I have noticed though that as I move through the campus the laptop software has a hard time keeping a continuous connection, i.e. as I move to a new area I would hope that the laptop would start communicating with the new closest router but it doesn't seem to be doing that. Everytime I move to a new area I have to tell the driver to repair my connection which renews my IP, registers the DNS, clears some other settings, etc etc and then I'm good to go again. Is there some standard fix for making this an automated process so that my connection is continually updated and with the proper routers as I move? Thanks for any suggestions,

Kev

Reply to
kevin.pavin
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snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

Yep. Welcome to the joy of "seamless roaming" and other problems that the 802.11r standard intends to address.

The problem is that your client is tenaciously hanging onto a given access point and will not give up looking for a better signal until the signal literally goes away for an extended period. That's both a feature and a curse. You don't want the client scanning for other conenctions all the time as this is disruptive. However, you also don't want to have it glued to a lousy signal as you're moving.

Being in a college creates another problem. If you hop from one access point to another, your authentication may not move with you. Some Kerberos based authentication systems use the MAC address of the access point to authenticate the port of entry. If that changes, you'll also have to re-authenticate. (I found this out the hard way trying to figure out how to make a wireless web cam run on a college campus shuttle bus).

The standard 802.11r fix is not ready for prime time. However, various manufacturers have recognized the problem and implimented tweaks to the wireless client driver settings to control the level of tenacity. I know that Intel Proset 10.x, and HP Broadcom 4.x drivers have these features. I don't know about the Dell 1390. Find the wireless driver in the Control Panel -> Network window. Look through the properties and settings for the wireless device. There may be something useful in there. Also, be sure to record the original settings as many such drivers have no "reset to defaults" or indication of what the default values should be. I would be interested in hearing if the Dell 1390 driver has such a feature. Since the Dell 1390 is Broadcom 44xx(??) chipset based and the driver is 4.x, the same feature may be present as in the HP versions.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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