Guys, I have a question about using the ‘roaming’ access point functionality with WDS…
The issue I have is the physical building I need to cover with decent wireless is a radio nightmare. Its a large freezer building about 100 meters by 50 meters and it broken up into about a half dozen rooms. Since all the walls in the facility are metal, and inside the rooms are full of metal racking loaded with frozen food wireless doesnt work very well moving from room to room - and a connection only via wireless to the other AP’s would not work well when the doors close (which is most of the time).
My goal is to put in a bunch of mikrotik AP’s and have them run on the same SSID with the same key code so the forklifts can travel freely from room to room without loosing network connectivty. Since the walls and doors are metal creating a very RF tight seal between the rooms, I need to connect the various AP’s with physical cat5 cabling.
Is there a way to configure the Mikrotik boards to run WDS, but maintain the connectivity between them with physical cabling vs wireless peers with WDS?
What you want is simple roaming, I don’t think you need WDS. Just set each AP to the same SSID, WPA key, and in your case, channel, and you should be fine.
side-note… MikroTik doesn’t do roaming very well (in other words: MikroTik doesn’t do anything to assist in roaming at all)
Other vendors have used standards like 802.11r and CCX to assist the clients with roaming from one AP to the other, and having diversity antennas helps a great deal when you have mobile devices in a highly reflective, indoor environment like the one you’re suggesting… and MikroTik stubbornly refuse to implement diversity. The new 11n support has introduced a form of diversity, but that is still in beta.
And to go back to your original question, as rpress said, what you want is simple roaming. Roaming is primarily a client-side feature, so make sure you are using good quality client devices.
OK…thanks guys…leave it up to the mobile forklift computers to figure out the jump…
So then…just for my ongoing mikrotik education, WDS is more of a means to put in essentially AP repeaters to expand the area of an AP’s coverage without then need for additional cabling - correct?
Why not use one AP but run “Leaky” Coax through the freezer area from end to end?
the savings in buying/maintaining lots of Active gear will most likly pay for the cost of such coax after a short amount of time.
JwTPN…leaky coax…wow. After years of being an amateur radio enthusiest I have now found use for the roll of rg59 that’s been floating around in my closet. It’s quite the opposite concept of what I have been doing with coax for years…
If that actually works - that would be quite clever. this sounds like a heck of an experiment…
Does anyone have any suggestions on what coax perferoms the best (or worst depending on the perspective) for this sort of scenerio? RG6 or RG58 would be the easiest to obtain - but I wouldnt have an aversion to trying something different.
There are a ton of reasons to install fewer AP’s - you just need to ask anyone who has tried to terminate ethernet cabling when it’s -15 F outside (it gets quite brittle).
Thanks for the great ideas guys…time to start playing and see what happens…
Leaky coax does not = bad coax! It’s a special type of coax cable with slits in the shielding. Usually the slits are cut in specific lengths in a specific pattern tuned to the wavelength of the signal it should leak.
And.. did you say RG-59/RG-6? That’s 75 ohms, forget using it for WiFi. WiFi is 50 ohms. At best you could use RG-58, but that would possibly be the worst choice you’d ever make (besides working in the wireless world ).
I would personally avoid leaky coax due to the amount of noise it picks up along the way, but I’ve never used it myself so I can’t really judge.
Touché andreacoppini -….lossy vs leaky coax….I really set myself up for that one and earned a good chastising.
The noise issue does concern me a little….but I would never know unless I actually tried it. We do have one advantage (or curse) and that the building is a perfect faraday cage so external RF is a non issue…however there is a ton of metal objects for RF to bounce off of, and plenty of sources of electrical interference like blower motors and lighting.
The concept is interesting to say the least. I’m not convinced this will be solution for us; but it certainly makes for an interesting tavern discussion some evening with my radio cronies.
Regardless, we are way off topic of my ‘misunderstanding’ about WDS’s capabilities. I’m a better person now, and hopefully someone else will benefit from this as well….
yes andreacoppini had it right, its a special coax (usualy 1/2" or larger) with slits in it.
Used a bit on cell site builds in things like shopping malls etc, very good for discrete and hard to do site in fill.
RFS and Andrew (comscope) both do 2.4ghz “Radiating Coax” and theres even multiband stuff for deploying cell phone and wifi…
Instead of using WDS would it be faster to just get a RB with 2 mini pci cards and set one to station and one to bridge?
Wouldn’t this allow 100% throughput on each “bridge” vs. ±50%?
So MIkrotik does not support combining several wireless networks together t form one. Like a cell phone provider network would have?
If you just name both your networks the same name and password and you searched your client.
Wouldn’t you just find 2* your ssid name instead of 1* your ssid name @ a better signal?
Reason im asking is, I would like to put up 3 * 90 degree sectors with a RB433H and they will overlap slightly.
i want the covered area to pick up one stronger signal as the clients are all spread out?
And in the future would like to put up more towers in nearby areas that “repeat that network”?
yes that would work, but it relies on the client to initiate the roaming between APs. Some AP vendors assist by implementing 802.11i for seamless roaming, but MikroTik doesn’t. If you use a MikroTik AP in this way, clients will have to take a ‘break-before-make’ approach, which results in a lot of packet losses.
What you want to achieve, having multiple base stations with the same SSID, is definitely achievable. In fact it is how most WISPs are set up. In your case, the client will not roam between APs very often (if at all!).
The Windows client will show you each individual AP as a separate entry (all with the same SSID), but once you’re connected, it will automatically choose which AP it will connect to based on signal strength.
In your setup I’m assuming you will have MikroTik or Ubiquity CPEs (clients). Not sure about the Ubiquity, but MikroTik will show you each AP as a separate entry as well (like Windows), but as long as the SSID is the same, it will connect to the AP with the strongest signal. Should that AP become unavailable for any reason (powered off, reset, moved, etc), the client will scan for another AP with the same SSID and connect to that one instead.
There can be as many APs as you want, as long as they all have the same SSID, the client will always connect to the one with the best signal.
Conceptually, cellphone systems are very similar to WISPs, but keep in mind that cellphone technology (GSM or UMTS nowadays) was built from the ground up with voice in mind, over long-ish distances, with small, low powered CPEs (mobile phones).. so it will always be much more robust than you will ever get with an 802.11 based setup like MikroTik, or any other license-free technology.
– Sidenote: I’m oversimplifying here, there are many features in MikroTik to control which client connects to which AP, but a search in the Wiki, the forum and the docs should give you a good idea how all this works.
It’s a special type of coax cable with slits in the shielding. Usually the slits are cut in specific lengths in a specific pattern tuned to the wavelength of the signal it should leak.