Having constant issues with WDS that I just can’t seem to overcome. One of the network projects i’m working on is a bit unusual in that the AP’s themselves roam around (only connected to each other by wifi, ethernet is not an option). I absolutely need for better convergence and routing. At present the AP’s absolutely insist on using the most direct connection, in that even if an absolutely terrible link from A-C is present it will always use A-C instead of going A-B-C. Heck even if A and B are directly next to each other (A having a terribly bad antenna and B incredibly good for testing) they still go the A-C route because its less hops, hence the throughput is absolutely terrible with dropped packets. I really need devices to aggressively shift towards sending packets via the best possible path of AP’s. Everything at the moment is a flat layer2 network - can be redesigned no worries if it helps
I’ve written custom scripts to drastically help with this but they still aren’t enough. Essentially the scripts will look at multiple parameters, try to determine the best link then kill all the rest. But they simply reconnect immediately and again everything goes A-C and it doesn’t work. This seems to be an issue with the WDS mesh that I have no control over - the metric between nodes
So i’ve even made the script create connect lists that explicitly will block nodes throughout the network. This does infact force an A-B-C link because it has no other choice. But I have to lift the connect list at some point because it has to check if B or C have moved around and it then becomes more viable to go A-C-B. Lifting the connect list is problematic because everything starts flowing over the crap link before the scripts determine ‘nope this is a rubbish connection, get rid of it’ so there’s constant interruption
I need video and control traffic to flow over this link, so it’s fairly important that packets don’t get lost. A brief interruption of a second or 2 is acceptable as long as the link stays solid until another change-over is needed, but not when the links constantly flaps up and down through bad nodes and cause terrible throughput
Am using WDS with HWMPplus but i’m not a foremost expert on either so I need to know if this can even be overcome or if I need to totally redesign the implementation (possibly even go another vendor)
Have thought about converting over to a Layer 3 design and using OSPF instead (so that all AP’s can stay connected to each other but OSPF reroutes accordingly) however i’m not entirely sure if this would even work.
So essentially… anyone have any tips to drastically improve the change-over and ‘routing’ (for lack of a better word) between mesh nodes to stick with the best possible link?
Am I able to manipulate the metric values myself? Since its a dynamic mesh I don’t see how I can influence that