Instant
Wave
High Speed
Access Point
7
Roaming
InstantWave High Speed products are equipped with seamless roaming capabilities.
Roaming is necessary to prevent mobile Stations from being disconnected from the
network as they move around.
InstantWave High Speed is designed to allow wireless Stations to roam freely
within an infrastructure domain composed of multiple APs with overlapping signal
coverage (as in the Type-3 network configuration described in the previous
section). For example, roaming enables Station-1 to move from the AP-1 signal
coverage area to the AP-2 signal coverage area without disconnecting from the
network. The handover is achieved transparently; the Station-1 user would not
realize he had moved from AP-1 to AP-2.
The requirements for a roaming environment are:
a)
Multiple APs with overlapping signal coverage (see Multiple APs
Installation, page 6)
b)
The APs must be configured to have the same Domain name (see AP
Setting, page 30)
c)
The mobile Stations must have the same Domain name as the APs
d)
*It is advisable that APs on different TCP/IP subnets be given different
Domain names to avoid roaming confusion (see AP Setting, page 30)
Note: If you want to move your mobile PC between different APs without
terminating the existing networking link, you need to enable the roaming
function on the Mobile Station. The APs that a Mobile Station will roam to
must also be configured with the same domain name (reference page 2). If a
Station detects that the signal quality with the current linked AP is weak, it
will search for an AP in the same domain with a better signal quality and
automatically establishes a new connection with it. “ When a Station is
roaming, it will always use the same IP address. The TCP/IP router will not
route information packets to a Mobile Station if it re-associates with a AP
that is in a different TCP/IP subnet. In other words, if your network consists
of two subnets connected by a router, a Mobile Station may roam to a
different subnet with the same domain name and then fails to communicate
with other network devices in TCP/IP. To avoid running into such an
awkward situation, you must assign different domain names to different
TCP/IP subnets.”
