can i associate with more than 1 APs (access points)

Hi ,

I have worked on the WiFi technology a bit. There is one question that intrigues me.

As of now, as per my knowledge, the WiFI technology can let your station associate only to one access point. If that AP goes down or if the station goes out of range, the whole scanning and association procedure is done which breaks the connection for some time. Now I was thinking, can I associate with 2 APs at once and periodically switch between them so that if one of the APs goes out of range, the other is still there. What I have in mind is that h a station will be associated to both the APs but in such a way that when it is communicating with AP1 it will be in a sleep mode for AP2. After a fixed time slot, it will wake up for AP2 and sleep for AP1 . This will keep happening.

My question is if we can do something like this with the current hardware, by just changing the MAC layer firmware, and if anyone could give suggestions on what changes will be required in the 802.11 protocol stack and/or the current hardware.

Awaiting for some awesome ideas 

Sid