On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 15:07 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote: > Hi, > > The Draft states that beacons may be sent either as defined for IBSS or > as defined for infrastructure mode. > > I have a few questions, some of which are related to our implementation > and others which are related to the Draft. > > 1. Are we going to let drivers choose which mode to use? Should they > indicate that somehow so userspace knows? Or are we going to make this > configurable? Can all hardware support both modes? (the last question > probably ties in with the next) > > 2. The Draft states to use either procedures 11.1.2.2 (IBSS) or 11.1.2.1 > (infrastructure). It is easy to "port" 11.1.2.1 to mesh, but 11.1.2.2 > reads like this: Next question, more relevant to how this affects the user: What's the meaningful difference between these two choices? When would you use one and when would you use the other? Should the user (ie, a user of something like NetworkManager) care whether a particular node is doing IBSS or infrastructure beacons? Dan > --- >% --- > [...] > > At each TBTT, the STA shall: > > [...] > > (d) Cancel the remaining random delay and the pending beacon > transmission, if a beacon arrives from the IBSS of which the STA is > a member before the random delay timer has expired, at which time > the ATIM backoff timer shall resume decrementing. > [...] > --- %< --- > > However, I feel that pointing from the mesh amendement to something > rather IBSS specific is not well defined. This clause doesn't > "obviously" port to mesh since the BSSID is left zeroed in mesh! But the > draft doesn't change 11.1.2.2 either to adjust for this difference. > > Hence, I think the draft needs to be expanded to modify 11.1.2.2 to > explain under which circumstances an MP shall cancel its beacon if it > opts to use IBSS-like beaconing. > > I think the only useful thing is to require it to look at the mesh IEs, > but that is not implementable with existing hardware, at least not > without firmware changes. I could probably do it in Broadcom firmware > fairly easily... > > So now I've probably answered my first question implicitly because I > pointed out how I think using IBSS-like beaconing isn't even > well-defined ;) > > johannes - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
