I’m a small italian WISP and now I have 15 AP in bridge network. I wish passing to routing networking for reordering and optimizing network and bandwith.
Questions are:
Routing: Each RB interfaces must have an IP of difference subnet and 2 wlan on 2 AP on the same link must have IP of the same subnet ( AP1 ↔ AP2 ↔ AP3 ; Wlan1 ↔ Wlan2a same IP Subnet; Wlan2b ↔ Wlan3 ecc) ?
What’s the best mode (bridge, bridge ap, ecc ) plus WDS and/or Netstream in contry mode ( italy country, 5ghz, 17db gain ) ? I’m reach 12Mb tx/rx in tcp.
You seem to be working in a daisy-chained fashion (ie. your upstream > AP1 > AP2 > AP3 > AP4) This could already be affecting your performance because
AP1 will handle all the traffic of the other 14 APs,
AP2 will handle all the traffic of the other 13 APs,
AP3 will handle all the traffic of the other 12 APs, etc. etc.
Ideally you would change to a setup where as many APs as possible connect back to your head office/upstream directly. I know it’s a bit of a problem due to EU power limits, but it’s always worth trying. In the end your setup would change to something like this:
Head > AP1
Head > AP2
Head > AP3
Head > AP4 > AP5
Head > AP6
In this example, AP5 was too far away from the head office so you needed to hop over AP4 to get to your upstream.
Once you have done 1, you don’t need to use WDS anywhere. Bridge and AP Bridge are actually very similar. In reality, they are both APs, but ‘Bridge’ mode only allows 1 ‘Client’ to connect, while ‘AP Bridge’ allows multiple ‘Clients’ (like a normal 802.11 AP).
Use nStreme on all mikrotik <> mikrotik links.
Use bridge mode <> client mode on point to point links (such as AP4 <> AP5 in the example above)
Use AP Bridge mode <> client mode on all other point to multipoint links (eg Head will be set to Bridge, WLAN(a) on each AP set to client)
Use AP Bridge mode on all your client facing APs (eg WLAN(b) on each AP)
Just assign IPs from different subnets for each WLAN interface facing your clients, enable RIP or OSPF on all your backhaul links, and watch your performance jump…
All the above assumes your clients are fixed or nomadic (ie. they switch off when they move from one AP to another). If you’re targeting mobile clients (eg. laptops in cars moving from one AP to another and remaining connected), then you would need a slightly different setup, but you can still avoid WDS.