From what I have read so far in this forum, I still have not found a solid answer to this question. Using 2.8.26 with Atheros cards, is there a way to do a transparent point-to-point bridge without using WDS? My understanding is that WDS is essentially halving my available bandwidth, which at half duplex is already half of what is reported. This should be a simple and common setup, but I have been unsucessful in doing it. Thanks in advance for any information.
Have thought about using an eoip tunnel?
Ken
halving your throughput?
Never seen anything like that when using WDS.. and what are you comparing it to that it’s halving?
WDS is lighter weight than EoIP, so you should get better throughput with WDS.
WDS only cuts the bandwidth in half if you are using it as a “repeater”, i.e. the packets need to egress via the same physical radio they came in on.
All WDS really does, is to expand the 802.11 header a little bit, by adding a few extra fields to carry the actual source and destination MAC addresses (and a few other flags and such) in addition to the BSSID MACs (thus making transparent bridging possable). This does cut the potential bandwidth by a bit, but not much.
EoIP re-encapsulates the entire ethernet frame inside an IP packet, so you would be adding two complete headers to each packet.
With straight 802.11 you have: IP over 802.11
With WDS you have: IP over “chubby” 802.11
With EoIP you have: IP over Ethernet over IP over 802.11.
–Eric
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/using-wds-to-bridge-wireless-interface/2369/1
scroll down to my two posts at the bottom…
WDS does not halve throughput… it adds a slight bit of overhead, but its not halving your throughput by any means.
I’m surprised that that it requires EoIP or WDS. But I guess it’s similar to what the other solutions are doing as well.
802.11 protocol does not have facilites to do 802.1d bridging unless you use WDS – it is that simple. Of course, we can bridge over any IP link when using EoIP – and that includes wireless 802.11 links with an AP and a station.
John