Virtual Wi-Fi
Last Post: December 2, 2005:
-
moe,
Even though I cannot describe you in details how we are working with multissids I can give you the clues on how this is done...
As you know clients have several way to query for available SSIDs :
- passive scanning (Beacon Management frames)
- active scanning (Probe Requests)
If the passive scanning can be confusing for some clients (Beacons sent with several SSIDs but always with the same BSSID... !?!?) you can however send directed (unicast) answer to a client requesting for available network... by the way of the Probe Response.
The scheme would be the following :
Message sent By client :
Probe Request "SSID = . "
Answer sent by the AP
Probe Response "SSID = OpenSSID"
Of course in this case the AP will provide only one "OpenSSID" in the Probe Response. The other Virtual SSIDs managed by the AP remain unseen... unless the client knows the SSID names and sends directed Probe Requests with the proper SSID name.
By working this way we have several Virtual SSIDs managed by one MAC address. Each Virtual SSID is independant from the other and has its own security settings.
The tests we are doing right now are good and it seems to me this is a valid solution. We manage to be always 802.11 standard compliant since this is a large scale project.
Hope it's clear
Regards
Chrisparis75
- 1