Wireless Roaming Frame Query for Battery Power Reduction

The system performs preliminary actions by maintaining a cached list of known access points and their characteristics from previous associations. During roaming, instead of scanning all possible channels, the station directly queries the cached access points using their known identifiers, significantly reducing the time required while maintaining measurement precision through targeted signal strength checks.

The patent implements skipping by eliminating the traditional sequential channel tuning and waiting process. The station skips directly to the access points of interest by using their identifiers from the cached list, sending targeted probe requests without waiting for beacons on each channel, thus rushing through the roaming determination process efficiently.

The patent segments the roaming process into two distinct phases: a caching phase where access point information is collected and stored during associations, and a query phase where specific cached access points are rapidly queried using short frames. This segmentation allows the system to use minimal energy during roaming by only querying known access points rather than scanning all channels.

Instead of performing complete channel scans to ensure all access points are reached, the system performs partial scanning by querying only the cached access points that are most likely to be relevant. This partial action approach uses significantly less energy and processing time while still achieving effective roaming determination.