A wireless roaming method and access controller

Abstract

The present application discloses a wireless roaming method, which includes: pre-sorting all access controllers AC participating in the roaming of the wireless client STA into different parallel roaming groups; all ACs in the same roaming group configure roaming Group information; each AC notifies the roaming group information to which it belongs to the STA connected to the AC; when roaming occurs, any of the above-mentioned ACs receives a re-authentication or re-association message from the STA carrying the roaming group information, and the AC according to Based on the configured roaming group information and the received re-authentication or re-association message, when the STA is determined to be roaming between groups, the Extended Authentication Protocol EAP re-authentication process is started; when the STA is determined to be roaming within the group, the key cache method is adopted. The application also discloses an access controller AC. The application can realize fast roaming among any multiple ACs and fast roaming across network segments, and can improve the performance of AC equipment.

Description

technical field [0001] The present application relates to roaming technology of wireless local area network, in particular to a wireless roaming method and an access controller. Background technique [0002] Roaming is a key technology of the wireless local area network (WLAN), and an important basis for realizing the mobility of wireless terminals. At present, the mainstream mode of WLAN networking is the access controller (AC) + thin AP (FIPAP) networking model. Under this networking condition, how to realize seamless roaming of wireless clients (STA), especially how to realize STA Roaming between different ACs is an important indicator for measuring the performance of wireless devices. [0003] At present, key cache (KeyCache) is mainly used to implement STA roaming among different ACs, such as figure 1 As shown, all ACs that may participate in the roaming of the mobile terminal form a roaming group. The establishment and maintenance of the roaming group are completed b...

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Problems solved by technology

[0005] Using the above existing technology, only one roaming group can be configured on the AC, and ACs outside the group cannot participate in roaming; and each roaming group can have a maximum of 8 roaming members, that is, roaming between 8 ACs, and more Roaming within an AC; roaming groups must be manually configured, which is cumbersome; when using key caching to achieve fast roaming, all ACs in the roaming group need to synchronize the key information of STAs connected to any member. For example, a roaming group has 6 members, each AC must synchronize the key information of the STAs of the other five ACs. When there are a certain number of online STAs, too many message exchanges and too many key storage entries will affect the performance of the AC device; Unable to achieve fast roaming across network segments

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