It is intended to establish a standard use of these technologies vs. the piecemeal approach currently taken by most makers of Wi-Fi product and ensure interoperability across device vendors.
The primary focus of the new Certification is to ensure intelligent steering and fast network transitions for devices to ensure fast, smooth roaming and band steering. Eliminating the cause of "sticky" clients will help to ensure better bandwidth use.
An examination of the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Agile Multiband™ Technology Overview indicates that the new Certification primarily uses features from 802.11k, v and r. The Wi-Fi Alliance features include expanded information reported between APs and client devices about preferred channels and bands for operation, as well as cellular capabilities of the devices.
Wi-Fi Agile Multiband also defines enhancements to the wireless network notification features in 802.11v that add reason codes for management actions and timeouts to throttle excessive requests and requires that devices support IEEE 802.11w protected management frames (PMF).
Reference designs and chipsets from Broadcom, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek and Qualcomm as well as a Ruckus R710 AP and ZoneDirector 1200 controller are in the first group of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Agile Multiband products and comprise the Certification testbed.
See the press release for more details.