WDS, hidden nodes and N-Streme

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi Everyone,

I have a config with three LANs bridged together by two wireless PTP links (RB133’s at each bridging point). It’s running fine configured with WDS, but I am wondering if N-Streme would help performance and if so how N-Streme should be configured.

Each bridging point has one wireless card and one antenna, LAN1 can see LAN2 and LAN2 can see LAN3, but LAN1 can’t see LAN3. The bridge at LAN2 is therefore acting as a relay when LAN1 and LAN3 need to talk to each other, but if they both talk at the same time, LAN2 is going to see a collision.

I’ve read a bit about N-Streme and thought that it might work well in this situation because LAN2 would be in control of who can talk when. I guess my first question would be is that true, would N-Streme be better?

I tried to set up N-Streme with only partial success. I wonder if someone can offer advice on how each bridge should be configured? At each point there is one wlan interface and one ethernet interface that need to be bridged together, plus the wireless links need to bridge together the remote ethernets. Should WDS still be a part of this kind of configuration? What modes should the wlan interfaces be set to at each point (ap, ap-bridge, etc)? Which interfaces should be part of the bridge pseudo-device?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

2

RB 133 don’t really have enough power to run Nstreme, so I would not consider it. The are really should only be used for customer radios or light traffic links.

I would recommend using 2 cards at your relay point, as your bandwidth is cut in half if you are using only one card.

Erik

3

I had previously thought about having two radios on the “middle” node and making the network into two point-to-point links. The links don’t experience particularly high traffic, I just wondered if there was a way to optimise it without having to buy and install more hardware (I’m probably just being unneccesarily stingy!). I thought polling might be good in this situation to avoid collisions, just haven’t been able to set up a configuration that works.

Thanks for the advice though, I might put the two radio setup back on my “to do” list.

Alan