From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from mail-px0-f174.google.com ([209.85.212.174]:61166 "EHLO mail-px0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752918Ab0D0BfA convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:35:00 -0400 Received: by pxi17 with SMTP id 17so1942993pxi.19 for ; Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:34:59 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: <1272324216-73349-1-git-send-email-nbd@openwrt.org> <20100426232332.GA2079@tuxdriver.com> <4BD621FA.1000405@openwrt.org> <20100427001233.GB2079@tuxdriver.com> From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:34:39 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] cfg80211: add ap isolation support To: "John W. Linville" , Jouni Malinen Cc: Felix Fietkau , linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org, johannes@sipsolutions.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: > On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:12 PM, John W. Linville > wrote: >> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 01:30:02AM +0200, Felix Fietkau wrote: >>> On 2010-04-27 1:23 AM, John W. Linville wrote: >>> > On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 01:23:35AM +0200, Felix Fietkau wrote: >>> >> This is used to configure APs to not bridge traffic between connected stations. >>> >> >>> >> Signed-off-by: Felix Fietkau >>> > >>> > Is this useful? >>> Yes, if you have an AP with lots of users that aren't expected to >>> communicate with each other (e.g. only for internet access), it can save >>> a lot of airtime by not forwarding every broadcast message emitted from >>> any station. >>> I'm sure there are a more situations where this can be useful. >> >> Ah, OK -- I suppose that makes sense. > > In fact technically IEEE-802.11 2007 section 11.7 states "STAs are not > allowed to transmit frames directly to other STAs in a BSS and should > always rely > on the AP for the delivery of the frames", with the exception being > using DLS direct links for QoS STAs.  This would prevent the STAs from > going into PS mode for as long duration of the stream. > > If the AP does not support this it would just set the result code for > DLS requests to "Not allowed in the BSS". It does not seem the > standard has a way for an AP to teardown an existing DLS links though > (at no reason code for it), so I guess if we ever support DLS we won't > be able to enable this option if a direct links is already > established. Now that I think about it, why is this even required, why not just enforce this all the time and have an option to disable DLS? Are there ways to enable direct STA <--> STA communication on a BSS other than DLS? Luis