Good performance of MultiNet depends on low switching delays. The main cause of the switching overhead in current generation wireless cards is the 802.11 protocol, which is executed every time the card switches to a network. The card believes that it has disassociated from the previous network, and starts association afresh. Further, these cards do not store state for more than one network in the firmware, and worse still, many card vendors force a firmware reset when changing the mode from ad hoc to infrastructure and vice versa.
Most of these problems are fixed in the next generation Native WiFi cards. These cards do not incur a firmware reset on changing their mode. Moreover, since switching is forced by MultiNet, Native WiFi cards do not explicitly disconnect from the network when switching. However, they still carry out the association procedure that causes the 25 to 30 ms delay. By allowing upper layer software to control associations, instead of automatically initializing them, this delay can be made negligible. The only overhead on switching is then the synchronization with the wireless network. This can be done reactively, with the card requesting a synchronization beacon when it switches to a network.