What does WDS mesh allow for that we cannot currently get with other Mikrotik means? I’m referring to features and performance.
Will RSTP still be required with the WDS for a truly mobile network?
Usually WDS is compared to EOIP tunnels. The advantage of WDS is that you do not take a performance hit for larger packets because EOIP has to break up packets over 1400 and some bytes (I’m too tired to do the math right now, but EOIP has an extra GRE + IP header overhead). WDS uses a larger on-the-air packet to move around two extra MAC addresses. Dynamic WDS allows units to setup a mesh automatically whereas EOIP would have to be manually setup in all the various link combinations. Dynamic WDS also deals with failures more easily because as a human you probably didn’t think of every link case you might need in the future for all possible failure scenerios.
RSTP is used in the mesh to keep layer 2 loops from forming and to allows the mesh nodes to automatically calculate the “best” path based on dynamic link quality and other static values.
Hope that helps.
okay, now what does WDS Mesh in 3.0 offer than we didn’t have with 2.9?
Still waiting for that answer. This from support last month:
"Hello,
We are still working on it, it’s not complete yet. Right now it’s just an advanced WDS system, it will create WDS links between all the MT routers which have this feature enabled.
Regards,
Normunds"
So as of that statement, it doesn’t seem much different than dynamic WDS.
From what I remember them saying about it at MUM was that the WDS Mesh would remember the WDS peers it had connected with in the past instead of removing them after they disconnected. It’s supposed to make disconnecting and reconnecting to different peers faster or something like that.. I haven’t tested it though..
-Gerard
That definately sounds good for mobile environments.
With the regular WDS, the WDS link appears on the one side of the router when it sees the beacon from the other AP that supports WDS. When you use WDS-mesh then this wds link establishing is more advanced and more stable.
But this is only a beginning of the WDS-mesh system. There will be a lot of other features added later.