You can get AP's that cleverly talk to one another and adjust themselves to
their environment. I have seen them in other equipment too, Firetide being the
one I remember most. They are really designed for large setups, hospitals,
campus, large venues in fields or what not with hundreds of clients.
Cheap asses like me just uses things like Open-WRT & DD-WRT instead :-)
If your access points support pre-auth mechanisms, then shared all the same
SSID & details, they should interoperate in a roaming setup just fine.
This link explains rather simply...
http://www.codealias.info/technotes/ieee_802.1x_pre-
authentication_in_wireless_networks
I setup a wifi using 3 TP-Link 901ND's in my landlords house, which is effing
huge. All of these are running DD-WRT. Once you auth to one AP, you basically
pre-auth to all other AP's the AP you just authed to can see & share similar
details with. This way when you roam between AP's, the impact is merely ms
compared to nearly a whole second (and more if you have to wait for DHCP). You
can even continue a VoIP call whilst you move between cells.
The problem most experience is when the AP's dont support this feature, you
have to do the full 4 way handshake again (even if it's to the same AP), which
can take a second or so. Some clients will also drop a leased IP from DHCP if
it disassociates from an AP. This would cause an immediate disconnect to your
IM or VoIP or the like.
Just so you know, I have used two cheap Natgear routers (the horrid white ones
Virgin kicked out years back) together, same SSID/PSK, LANs shared, they did
pre-auth absolutely fine, which was, err, shocking!
