APs in WDS causing traffic loop?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi there,

I’m not sure what is causing this but…I have 4 APs in WDS right now working fine, when I try adding the 5th this is where I notice a surge of traffic bouncing around the Network, as you can see from the snapshot it looks like 2.1Gbps of traffic that will appear and then quickly disappear under the Interface list, it will do this until I power down that 5th AP and show for about 1 sec and disappear for about 2 sec, then appear…etc. over and over…causing no one to be able to connect to the wireless once this 5th AP is connected, I have STP enabled in the bridge with ‘eth’ and ‘wlan’ ports in this bridge on all APs.

Any Suggestions are very welcome and thanks for your time.
snap2.JPG

2

I’m not positive but try rstp instead of stp and see what happens.

3

All of the AP are the RB-CrossRoads with RouterOS 2.9.5 so I did not see the RSTP in that firmware, as being outdated I will try to update to at least 3.13 or 3.20 and then enable RSTP to see what will become of it, later in the week.

Does anyone know if this is the best way to set this up with multiple APs(5 or more) all in AP Bridge mode. ? ? ? dynamic WDS on bridge1 as well.

Thanks for your responses people.

4

Maybe you put something in the WDS-menu on the client? On the client (the one running Station-WDS) - make sure you don’t put anything in the menus for WDS Mode and WDS default bridge - these should be “disabled” and “none”.

5

Thankyou. The AP’s(clients) are in AP Bridge not ‘station WDS’. So all AP’s in AP Bridge with WDS set as Dynamic mode and on Bridge1, This is what I was wondering if it would make most sense to setup all AP’s in AP Bridge with Dynamic WDS, I have used this on other sites and it seems to be just fine I believe. Anyways I appreciate your suggestions and feel free to post more suggestions. Always worth while.

Cheers!

6

Does the 5th AP connect to one or two other APs?
You could be getting a loop if it connects to more than one AP.

7

I was wondering what you meant by connecting to more than one AP, under the wireless registration I see the other AP in WDS, all of them.(4) so to me I would think that it would be connecting to all APs, is this not right, or rather where should I be looking for which it is connecting too, thanks and I really appreciate your help on tihs.

Cheers!

8

you should go for RSTP, as that is faster protocol to resolve bridging loops

if you are currently using 2.9.5 (or are you using 2.9.50?) you can try to install 2.9.51 and rstp package, that will give you functionality of restp in 2.9 version.

9

You should configure each AP to be connected to only one other AP.
If not, make sure you correctly set the WDS Cost.

10

Yes I have seen the WDS cost, not sure how this work sadly, can you please explain this?

Thank you.

11

did notice that a route had not been added back to gateway, i’ve since added dst-address 0.0.0.0/0 and gateway 192.168.2.1 to the route list on each AP, would this have caused the traffic loop, I havn’t been able to get back to Enable the conflicting AP, just wondering if this lack of routing might have caused the AP to keep circultating the traffic with no route back to the gateway…

Thanks.