From: Jouni Malinen (jkmaline_at_cc.hut.fi)
Date: 2002-07-12 06:38:10 UTC
On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 11:36:13AM -0500, Jim Thompson wrote:
> There were some hints a few months back (from Jouni)
> that the hostap driver might be able to support both BSS
> (AP) mode an IBSS ('ad hoc') mode simultaneously.
>
> However after a carefull reading, the Intersil docs seems to imply
> that Port 0 is either in BSS or IBSS mode, but not both.
Well.. It wouldn't be the first thing that Intersil docs/support does not consider possible and I have included in the driver.. ;-)
I do not remember what I wrote about this, but hopefully not exactly that the same card would act as an AP in a BSS and simultaneously in IBSS. This might prove to be quite difficult (=impossible) if the card would need to be able to send beacons in both modes. I would first start with implementing driver based auth/assoc for STA using BSS (i.e., both AP and STA to another AP at the same time).
If AP and IBSS (i.e., _not_ pseudo ad hoc) is needed, one could try to avoid being the STA sending beacons for IBSS. However, I have not studied IBSS beacon part of IEEE 802.11 thoroughly enough to say whether this is possible without breaking something.
> Are there any further thoughts or developments on this front?
I have designed a test system that would use Host AP mode so that wlan0 would be the AP and then there would be another netdev (like wlan0sta) that would associate with another AP (i.e., host driver-based auth&assoc). I haven't yet implemented this, but all the needed changes look quite straightforward. In other words, I hope to test this at some point.
-- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA