Two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have dramatically shortened WiFi handoff time -- overcoming a major obstacle in Wi-Fi roaming, according to Science Blog.

Professor Stefan Savage and graduate student Ishwar Ramani have a patent pending on the basic invention behind SyncScan, a process to achieve practical, fast handoff for 802.11 infrastructure networks. Their study will be published in the Proceedings of the IEEE InfoCom 2005.

At present, Wi-Fi handoffs are cumbersome. Not until the access-point signal weakens substantially and begins losing packets of data does a Wi-Fi-enabled device begin scanning for a stronger signal. At that point, it broadcasts requests on all channels to find nearby access points. The result: a delay of up to one second, during which any packets may be lost.