Running dynamic WDS to all clients - any caveats?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,
I’m currently lab testing a wireless network topology where I have an RB433AH running ros 3.22 wireless-test with R52 wireless cards, with ubiquiti clients (combination of nanostation loco and bullets). The AP has dynamic WDS enabled, and clients are set to station WDS mode.

The bridge which the WDS adds the clients to is bridged to ether1, where there is a DHCP server on the LAN.

When any traffic is sent to a wireless client, and I look in the interfaces screen in winbox, I see the same traffic throughput going to all dynamic WDS interfaces.

Is this the intended behaviour?

If clients are connected at different modulations, does that mean that the downstream speed for the clients is limited to that of the client with the lowest modulation?

Are there any other issues I should be aware of when running WDS to the client devices?

My main reason for using WDS is I would like to be able to run several VLANs to the customer, eg one for management traffic to the CPE device and one to handle the PPPoE traffic to the customer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-jonesy

2

OK, I’m going to bump this as I have a bit more info.

I am running VLANs over the WDS (which is the whole reason for using WDS). When traffic with a VLAN tag is sent FROM a WDS client (nanostation loco at the moment), I see the traffic going to EVERY OTHER WDS client on the same wireless interface. This causes me a problem because it effectively limits the UPLOAD speeds of every connected radio to the speed of the DOWNLOAD speed of the slowest client.

I have only noticed this happening when the VLAN interface on the bridge, is itself a member port in another bridge.

Any help would be really appreciated, I’m getting pretty frustrated!

3

sounds like vlans are the cause of your problem.
maybe use pppoe?

4

Thanks for the reply.
I do intend to use PPPoE within the VLAN, but I need to be able to separate the management traffic from the customer Internet traffic, so I need to be able to run vlans to the CPE.

5

I’ve been talking to mikrotik support about this issue, hopefully they can fix the bug!

6

If you don’t mind that your client don’t have more that one pppoe session behind there antenna, you can simply use " station pseudobridge " ( Mac-Nat is done in this mode !! ) . We use it for a 200 clients networks.

We also use " areacode " so that our CPE can connect on any of our AP with-out a reconfiguration.

We also create a virtual AP on eatch wireless AP that we vlan tag to be abble to support our old Tranzeo CPE that can’t support VLAN

Here is a part of our conf :

=========== AP ==================

####################################################################################################
# ---- Ethernet ----
####################################################################################################
/interface ethernet
set 0 disabled=no name="Uplink"\
/interface bridge
add disabled=no name="bridge_management"
add disabled=no name="bridge_traffic"
####################################################################################################
# ---- Vlan Uplink ----
####################################################################################################
/interface vlan 
add disabled=no interface=Uplink name="Uplink_vlan_data" vlan-id=22
add disabled=no interface=Uplink name="Uplink_vlan_management" vlan-id=29
####################################################################################################
# ---- Wireless Interface ----
####################################################################################################
/interface wireless
set 0 allow-sharedkey=no antenna-mode=ant-a band=2.4ghz-b default-authentication=yes disabled=no \
	default-forwarding=no hide-ssid=no mode=ap-bridge  preamble-mode=both security-profile=Ancienne_clef_wep \
	name="AP21" ssid="new_ssid_with_vlan" area="coderegion21" frequency=2412 radio-name="AP21"
add default-authentication=yes default-forwarding=no \
     disabled=no hide-ssid=no security-profile=Ancienne_clef_wep \
     master-interface=AP21 name="old21" ssid="legacy_wireless_no_vlan21"
####################################################################################################    
# ---- Vlan Wireless ----
####################################################################################################
/interface vlan
add disabled=no interface=AP21 mtu=1500 name="Ap21_management" vlan-id=29
add disabled=no interface=AP21 mtu=1500 name="Ap21_data" vlan-id=22
####################################################################################################
# ---- Bridge Port ----
####################################################################################################
/interface bridge port
add bridge=bridge_management disabled=no interface=Uplink_vlan_management
add bridge=bridge_management disabled=no interface=Ap21_management
add bridge=bridge_traffic disabled=no interface=Uplink_vlan_data
add bridge=bridge_traffic disabled=no interface=Ap23_data
add bridge=bridge_traffic disabled=no interface=old21



=========== CPE ==================

####################################################################################################
# ---- Ethernet ----
####################################################################################################
/ interface bridge
add disabled=no name=bridge_client
/interface ethernet
set 0 comment="Client Network" disabled=no name=FastEthernet
####################################################################################################
# ---- Wireless ----
####################################################################################################
/interface wireless
set 0 band=2.4ghz-b default-authentication=yes default-forwarding=yes disabled=no \
    mode=station-pseudobridge name=CPE security-profile=Ancienne_clef_wep ssid=""
####################################################################################################    
# ---- Vlan Wireless ----
####################################################################################################
/interface vlan
add disabled=no interface=CPE name=CPE_vlan22_data vlan-id=22
add disabled=no interface=CPE name=CPE_vlan29_management vlan-id=29
####################################################################################################
# ---- Bridge Port ----
####################################################################################################
/interface bridge port
add bridge=bridge_client disabled=no interface=FastEthernet
add bridge=bridge_client disabled=no interface=CPE_vlan22_data
####################################################################################################
# ---- Connection List ----
####################################################################################################
/interface wireless connect-list
add area-prefix=coderegion connect=yes disabled=no interface=CPE security-profile=Ancienne_clef_wep
add area-prefix="" connect=no disabled=no interface=CPE ssid=""
####################################################################################################
# ---- Client DHCP ----
####################################################################################################
/ip address
remove 0
/ip dhcp-client
add add-default-route=yes default-route-distance=0 disabled=no interface=CPE_vlan29_management\
	use-peer-dns=yes use-peer-ntp=yes

The only problem with station pseudobridge, it with non-ip protocol like pppoe, you can have more that a PC behind the CPE that use non-ip protocol.

But for a typical client that will have a router at home, this config is perfect !