Station WDS or Station Bridge in Point to Point?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

What are the differences between Station WDS mode and Station Bridge mode?
Why is it preferable to use Station Bridge mode?

Here’s what the mikrotik manual says about it:

Station WDS

  • This mode is safe to use for L2 bridging and gives most administrative control on AP by means of separate WDS interface, for example use of bridge firewall, RSTP for loop detection and avoidance, etc.

Station Bridge

  • This mode is safe to use for L2 bridging and is the preferred mode unless there are specific reasons to use station-wds mode.
2

Because the station bridge works with mikrotik ap only and wds is more compatible with other brands.

3

Yes, basically:

station-bridge only works MKT<–>MKT
station-wds when using no security works MKT<–>other vendor, but when using security often only works MKT<–>MKT
station-pseudobridge works MKT<–>any vendor, but limit of one MAC address on station side

If you need wireless bridging with MKT<–>other vendor, and you need more than one MAC on the station side, station-wds is about the only option, and then you likely can’t use security. We have used this mode to interface with Ubiquiti APs.

If you are doing MKT<–>MKT there is probably no good reason to use station-wds instead of station-bridge

4

But is there a performance difference when using Station WDS when using NV2?
I ask because I have already tested both modes and have not noticed any performance differences.

Does the station WDS mode allow it to traffic N-mode frame aggregation? Someone told me that it does not allow for frame aggregation.

5

Sorry to resurrect such an old topic - but I am creating a p2p link, and I need my router do get the IP from the ISP DHCP - over the bridge. I understood that this is the feature of WDS, that it allows the L2 (it’s L2 right?) DHCP request to pass trough the bridge. Or will it also work with one antenna as bridge, and other as station bridge without WDS enabled?

6

WDS is the only way when both devices in the bridge are from different vendors. If both are from Mikrotik, then it is possible to do it according to the second part of quoted question. Or in case of point-to-multipoint, “master” device is set to “ap-bridge” to allow multiple station (or station-bridge) clients.