Re: [PATCH] mac80211: retry auth and assoc on error 17

[Jouni Malinen <j@w1.fi>]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 05:40:17PM +0300, Eliad Peller wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Johannes Berg
> <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-05-15 at 17:21 +0300, Eliad Peller wrote:
> >> In some congested environments APs return
> >> WLAN_STATUS_AP_UNABLE_TO_HANDLE_NEW_STA on auth/assoc
> >> attempt. Instead of failing immediately, retry again
> >> in 200 msec.
> >
> > I think this should be in wpa_supplicant?
> >
> it behaves similarly to WLAN_STATUS_ASSOC_REJECTED_TEMPORARILY, which
> handled by mac80211, so i thought it would be fine to handle it as
> well (and this way it can also be used by iw).

WLAN_STATUS_ASSOC_REJECTED_TEMPORARILY is a special case in which the AP
provides a clear expectation of the association succeeding after the
specified amount of time. WLAN_STATUS_AP_UNABLE_TO_HANDLE_NEW_STA is
quite different since it can be used by APs to enforce load balancing.
It does not sound like a good idea to enforce mac80211 to retry
association with the same AP unconditionally in this case. I would also
leave this for wpa_supplicant which has already been optimized to handle
the load balancing case without this type of extra latency added.
Disabling this functionality would not be good for many enterprise
networks.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA