not that it matters in the slightest, but i'd actually consider the zero-handoff capability to be more like a 'wireless mesh', whereas getting booted from one ap and seeking out another to be more like 'roaming'. kind of like how a roaming cellphone connects over another provider when they lose signal to their own, etc.
Not really. In cellular, the term
roaming means moving from a cell site owned by carrier A to one owned by company B, where A and B have roaming agreements that are both technical and financial. But moving moving among cell sites within the same company/carrier is called
handoff. In cellular, very few carriers support roaming with call/connection preservation. Example: Say Sprint has a roaming agreement with a rural area carrier named zzz. Most often, when leaving coverage of Sprint, the phone must search for a new base station with which Sprint has a roaming agreement, then reconnect. It's getting better, but most often that "roam" on to zzz's network is a dropped call.
In cellular, the decision to change from base station 1 to 2, (intra-company) is usually made by the handset. Some systems do base station directed handoffs (handset is commanded to change to a particular new base station and sector/channel). CDMA cellular (Verizon and Sprint in the US) has 3G
soft handoff; this is where 2+ base stations are receiving the handset's weak signal. The base stations' digital frames are voted and combined based on the bit errors in each frame. Thus, soft-handoff means that 2+ base stations' receivers are combining received data until the handset moves so that one base station is too errored and is dropped in the combinations and voting. 4G LTE has some of the same concepts.
In WiFi, the IEEE standards lack a definition of how to do
handoffs as defined above. So Enterprise systems that do fast handoff do so by proprietary means and special software is needed on the client devices. Cisco started doing this with the original Aironet/Cisco hardware long ago, and generously open-sourced the protocols for the client PC and some handhelds, named Cisco Certified Extensions or some such.
The term
mesh network in wireless is about routing among access nodes - rather than how a user accesses the network. The goal in a mesh is to reduce the number of "egress" points - for example a wired or wireless connection directly to a router that has a WAN connection. In wide area coverage mesh systems, it's cost prohibitive to have a lot of access devices have direct connectivity (say, cat5 or a dedicated wireless link), to reach the router/Internet. The inter-node wireless can be the same RF channel as user device are on, or can be via a second radio in each node to do this "backhaul". With the demise of Earthlink's adventures in citywide mesh networks some years back, mesh networks are mostly seen in all-on-wheels/feet military networks.