Changing Auto-Connect feature

[Franco Miceli <fmiceli plan ceibal edu uy>]

Hi,

I'm part of a project in Uruguay (Plan Ceibal), that aims to give educational connectivity to primary school students

We've been working with the XO platform (Sugar, Fedora 9 -soon 11-), and have had the following issue regarding NM auto-connect feature.

We provide connectivity in the school yard via large outdoor wireless equipment and indoors with smaller AP. It has come to our attention that NM auto-connects to the last AP the XO connected to. Since the outdoor equipment is still visible indoors the XO connects to it even if it has less quality than the indoor equipment. This gives us problems in capacity planning and coverage.

We consider the auto-connect feature to be most useful at the school, but we want the choice of connection to be more than just "the last one it connected to". Therefore we want to to make some changes to the NM code in order to take into consideration other factors such as: SNR, loss %, etc.

We already have the code of the NM OLPC uses on the XO. What we wanted to know is where inside all the *.c files to look for this functionality and also if anyone has had any experience with this in order to give us some advice on how to approach this subject.

Thanks in advance,