How To Determine Connected Wifi WLAN Interface in Windows with C/C++?

Question

On Windows, how can I determine which Wifi WLAN interface returned by WlanGetAvailableNetworkList() is connected?

I am successfully using WlanGetAvailableNetworkList() on Windows 8 to scan for a list of Wifi WLAN access points and determine their SSID, BSSID, signal strength, and other information. I am following the example on this MSDN reference page.

Yet, for all the interfaces WLAN_INTERFACE_INFO I receive, I cannot determine how to tell which access point, if any, is currently connected (i.e. wlan_interface_state_connected).

On the Mac, I use scanForNetworksWithSSID from the CoreWLAN foundation, and the result has a connected bssid field which I can compare with each bssid from the scan results to determine which one of them is connected. I am looking for a similar Windows solution.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Answer:

The answer is to use WlanQueryInterface() (operationally similar to and used in parallel with WlanGetAvailableNetworkList()) to determine the WLAN_CONNECTION_ATTRIBUTES and WLAN_ASSOCIATION_ATTRIBUTES of the connected adapter. There is an example demonstrating the use of WlanQueryInterface() in the MSDN documentation at the bottom of this page.

I solved the problem by calling WlanQueryInterface() to determine the connectedSSID of the connected Wifi WLAN Adapter, if there is one. Then, I compare it with the SSID values for each of the Adapters referenced in WlanGetAvailableNetworkList(). A match, if there is one, determines the scanned adapter that is connected.

Note: I could also have compared BSSID values for a similar and possibly more reliable result.