Hi,
I do have a little question about the compatibility of multicast-helper in a Point-to-Point scenario. I did not find any references in the documentation for this specific scenario and I did not find a post for this in the forum as well.
If all of our other proposed options are not feasible, I might have to built some sort of point-to-point wireless connection in a very crowded WiFi-Environment. To make things a bit more complicated, one end of the connection has to be terminated on a rotating stage. I thought about using a NetMetal ax with a omnidirectional antenna at the center of the stage and a directional antenna like the mANTbox ax 15s at the side of the stage. This should result in a more or less static distance between access point and station. Distances are rather short between 12 and 15 meters. One of the requirements is to transport some multicast data between endpoints. This is not very high bandwith, but jitter matters and should be as low as possible. Of course there is no concrete statement of the manufacturer what magnitude of jitter is acceptable. All in all this situation is very far from ideal and of course I am conscius about the high probability that this is not going to work reliably at all.
Apart from the circumstances regarding the WiFi connection itself, I have to think about the multicast transport over WiFi, too. As multicast does not really work well over WiFi, there is the multicast-helper functionality to convert multicast-packets into unicast frames for every station. This is to avoid falling back to the most basic supported rate and wasting airtime.
So far so good, but:
Does this mechanism also work for station-bridge mode access points? Am i right if I assume, that this conversion to unicast only happens at the physical layer and after being received at the station the packet just appears like the original packet and can be forwarded further? Or is multicast-helper not working in a station-bridge scenario at all and I have to use one of the plenty L2 tunnel technologies available?
Thanks for your help and best regards!