[Cerowrt-devel] treating 2.4ghz as -legacy?

[David Lang]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2013, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 07:04:54PM -0800, David Lang wrote:
>> As far as I have been able to tell this is purely a software thing.
>> I'm not sure that it's even that it's so complicated as it is that
>> there are no standards for APs to talk to each other to do this sort
>> of thing so nobody has tackled it as an opensource project.
>
> The question is whether you can get the signal strength for a client
> from an AP which isn't associated with the client.  It may not require
> special hardwar, but it would seem to me that it would require special
> firmware in the WiFi device on the AP, right?

I don't believe so. kismit will show all devices without associating with them. 
You can't use it on an active AP, but that's because it wants to scan through 
the different channels. I don't see any reason why you couldn't report the 
signal strength that you do hear.

Now, the fact that you are not scanning will mean that you will probably not see 
the client from all APs, so the smarts in the system will have to know where the 
various APs are, on what channels, and make decisions like 'nobody respond to 
this client on channel 1, AP 53 is on channel 6 and is closer than any AP on 
channel 1.

David Lang