AC WiFi requires local forwarding

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi All,

Local forwarding must be enabled if I want any performance over 25 Mbit over WiFi with WAP-AC units.

Does this seem correct?

Bottleneck appears to be somewhere in the bridge-cpu or CAPsMAN tunnel.

Anyone getting good performance with local forwarding=OFF?

I am testing with CRS125 units as switches and one as CAPsMAN/router. The access points are WAP-AC.

With local forwarding ON - 70+Mbit wireless
With local forwarding OFF - 20Mbit wireless

2

I’m getting a decent performance with eight ac-capabale CAPs, CCR1009 as CAPsMAN and local forwarding off. Cannot tell you the exact numbers, but they are definitely much higher then 20Mbit/s (the last time I did some tests, I could easily saturate my two ISP links, 50x50 each, with a couple of wireless clients).

3

CCR1009 has the horsepower to “catch” all those tunnels. I think this is where things are falling off.

Performance per client should be able to saturate the wireless bandwidth and I’m not seeing that.

Thanks for the reply.

  • would love to see some specs directly from Mikrotik staff if possible.
4

Remember non-local forwarding will tunnel all connectivity back through the controller. Issues related to MTU from the tunneling and subsequent fragmentation is possible. Additionally, if the radio’s are at a shared point of contention you may be seeing issues. An example could be a non-local CAPSMAN and the tunnel is going over the Internet into CAPSMAN and back out. Alternatively, 14 radio’s sharing a single gigabit or fastethernet uplink to a CAPSMAN when you are trying access say a shared file server by multiple people.

5

Both Radios are plugged directly into the CAPsMAN controller (a CRS125) with GigE cables. The MTU issue seems like a good starting point for tuning so entire packets are encapsulated - where is this configured in CAPsMAN and wouldn’t defaults address this?