Seamless roaming

Computer users may no longer have to stay put in an airport lounge to access the high-speed Internet via an 802.11 Wi-Fi network.

Thanks to software developed by two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, the time it takes to hand off from one Wi-Fi wireless network to the next can be dramatically shortened - overcoming a major obstacle in Wi-Fi roaming.

Jacobs School of Engineering professor Stefan Savage and graduate student Ishwar Ramani have a patent pending on the basic invention behind SyncScan, a process to achieve practical, fast handoff for 802.11 infrastructure networks.

Their study will be published in the Proceedings of the IEEE InfoCom 2005.

“Wi-Fi offers tremendous speeds if you stay in one place or at least within 100 metres of the same access point,” said Savage, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department and academic participant in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.