What WAPs to buy to create a WiFi "bubble" so I dont have to drop 1 WAP to move to the next.

[integraoligist]

Hey all,
I remember reading about them before but I can't find them now.
I've got a large home that will need 3-4 WAPs... and I want to be able to walk through the home and seamlessly connect to the next (higher signal) WAP without having to go into the devices and manually switch them.

What WAPs do I need to accomplish this?

Thanks all!

 

[bill001g]

Cisco or Avaya commercial equipment along with a expensive controller.

You have 2 issues.

First is the stupid PC. It will not change from a weak signal to a stronger one until it almost completely loses the signal. You to some extend can change this with the roaming aggressiveness setting in the nic but it still does a very poor job. If you set it too aggressive it will jump around too much. The commercial systems actually load a special client so the WiFi controller can force you to move based on load and capacity as well as things like errors.

The second problem is related to the encryption. When you associate with a AP part of the process uses the mac address of the client and the AP to generate the keys. Since the mac addresses are different ap to ap you cannot use the exact same authentication on top of this the keys you are actively using change over time and the new ap does not know this. The commercial equipment passes this information from the controller to the new ap to minimize the disruption as you switch. Without this you must run the whole authentication process from the start. This is also why you do not want to set the roaming too aggressive because you will spend all your time doing ap authentication.

So far I have not found any type of free AP controller that could work with say something like dd-wrt based AP and of course consumer stuff has no clue on something as advanced as roaming.