AP automatic channel selection?

[Bernhard Schmidt]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 15:29, Lev Serebryakov <lev at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hello, Freebsd-wireless.
>
>  Is  it possible to implement automatic channel selection by AP, with
>  ath driver?
>
>  Some SOHO routers have such functionality.
>
>  I mean, that  card  could  monitor  channels  activity  like  new
>  "athsurvey" tool does, say, one per minute, and switch to channel
>  which was least busy for, say, last 10 minutes. It should not switch
>  more often tan same 10 minutes (all configurable) in any case.
>
>  It seems, that in my environment, channels' occupation depends on
>  time of day very much, and what is good for morning is not so good
>  for night.

Those APs I know which do auto channel selection scan all channels
once and select one where the least traffic has been seen. This is a
one time thing, before bringing up the AP itself, as monitoring once a
channel has been brought up is close to impossible. To do so, the
hardware would have to switch to another channel, check what's going
one and switch back to the service channel. While this happens no
clients can be served because the hardware is obviously not on the
service channel. This has been seen as to disruptive for anyone who
thought about implementing such a feature.

I'm not to familiar with the survey tool, but I guess it does also
have to switch channels.

If you don't care about your clients loosing connection for a bit, you
could obviously stop the AP, do a scan (or use the survey tool) and
based on the results select another channel before bringing up the AP
again. I'm not aware that anyone has done something like that already,
though, writing a script doing just that shouldn't be too hard.

-- 
Bernhard