MWaveLan

A New GPL Driver for the Wavelan IEEE/Orinoco



Features Release Notes Driver History Extensions Download Examples MAPI Moustafa Youssef Home Page


Introduction

The Wavelan IEEE is the current generation of Wireless LAN hardware offered by Lucent (and others). A more detailed description is available in the Wireless Howto. Currently, there are three main drivers supporting the same Wavelan IEEE hardware. One is the new MPL/GPL driver, called orinoco_cs. One is the old GPL driver, called wvlan_cs. The last one is based on a binary library and supported by Lucent, called wavelan2_cs

All three drivers lack the ability to provide the signal strength measurement from all the access points reachable from a card. Although this information should be available as the signal strength measurements are required to determine the access point to associate to, this information has been hidden from the device drivers. Moreover, since Lucent Client Manager for Windows provides such information, and Lucent says that their Linux driver has all the feature of the Windows driver, then again, there must be a way to get the signal strength measurement from the card. That was may starting point to hack the Lucent driver (wavelan2_cs) to get all the information collected by the Lucent Client Manager for Windows.

Of course, having the signal strength measurements from all access points can help in site design and in some methods of location determination on which a number of location-aware applications can be built.

Features

    The mwavelan_cs driver supports all the features of the Lucent wavelan2_cs driver. In  addition, the following features are supported:

Issues and release notes for mwavelan_cs

Driver History

Future Extensions

Download the MWaveLan Driver

    Click here to download.

Examples of Information Collected by the Driver

    Click here for examples.

 


Comments or Suggestions? Please email: Moustafa Youssef
Updated 9 November 2001