It must be a device operating system issue where the Wifi driver signals a
Hi Jason, link
break of some kind to the TCPIP stack.
One thing I have wondered but don't know the answer to, if a client switches AP's even on the same SSID is a DHCP request made at re-connection? I suppose the answer is yes - the client would reset all IP connections as
Yes, quite probably - I have seen it happen relatively often that an application times out just as soon as a link goes off. Maybe it is a sensible thing for the OS to do from a general case perspective, but it doesn't help at all in context of wifi roaming behaviour ;) the
network settings *may* change with a new DHCP request.
Same deal, I think. If wireless networking stack considers re-training wifi connection to be same as interface-down - interface-up then DHCP lease WILL be renewed also. Maybe there might be some wifi adapter driver configuration options that can affect the way that works?
This is how a trick like keeping the AP MAC the same as a client roams would stop devices closing their connections as no new DHCP request is made.
Yes - the way I figure it, the gist of this scheme would be to implement some kind of mac-address lookup table on the AP that translates the source MAC value on outgoing packets, and dst-nats received packets to the real address. At the same time, I guess, the AP that really DOES have the destination mac address would need to filter out packets from that client. Although it is a realtively simple thing to do (I am sure it could already be done on a static/manual level using existing bridge filter feature of routerOS) I imagine that it would be far from trivial matter to actually implement on software ;)
One thing to try would be to run OpenVPN on the sensitive clients. My limited experience in the past shows you can break and make your ethernet or ADSL connection and OpenVPN will resume any connections it's encapsulating like nothing happened. So, OpenVPN client paired with a Mikrotik OpenVPN server and set as the default route would ensure a client like Facetime or SIP VoIP would still keep running as the hullabaloo of switching AP's would be abstracted away from the client application and it won't drop the connection.
Interesting idea - please report back once you've got it tested! :-D Cheers, Mike.