Infrastructure for testing WLAN roaming

WLAN (wireless local area networks) are proliferating wildly, at home, in business, and across the globe in public places. These types of networks are based on devices according to the IEEE 802.11 standard. A main drawback for the nomadic user is that roaming mechanisms for PWLAN have not been standardized. Some organizations have started a definition process in order to standardize a set of open interfaces to connect the different elements involved in the PWLAN roaming scenario. This contribution presents the work developed to provide testing infrastructure to validate WLAN roaming solutions. A combination of network interoperability testing and conformance testing is presented. The testing infrastructure has already been used and the main causes of interoperability problems have been identified