Roaming

InstantWave High Rate 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 Rate 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 AP Installation, page 5)

b)The APs must be configured to have the same Domain name (see AP COMFig/Service, page 12)

c)The mobile Stations must have the same Domain name as that of the APs

d)*It is advisable that APs on different TCP/IP subnets be given different Domain names to avoid roaming confusion (see AP COMFig/Service, page 12)

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. 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 establish 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 fail to communicate with other network devices via TCP/IP. To avoid running into such an awkward situation, you must assign different domain names to different TCP/IP subnets.

6InstantWave High Rate 11Mbps Access Point