I want to create a wireless system that will allow clients to hop between access points without interruption. It seems as though WDS is close however I want there to be more bandwidth available. So there will be ethernet drops at the AP’s.
Is this possible?
if you want roaming with ethernet drops to aps, easy. Bridge the ether and wireless interfaces and put all the ethernet drops into a single switch.
You will have a flat network.
Kindly clarify a bit.
What do you mean by ethernet drops? What if you need roaming between distant sites?
It’s in a single manufacturing facility so no extreme distant sites. For ethernet drops, I mean each AP is hooked up to the ethernet network. With WDS, it’s only wireless but the bandwidth is too little as you add more AP’s.
Miahac - Can you clarify a bit more of how you would go about setting that up in Mikrotik? It doesn’t need to be command by command, but just a rough process.
Thanks!
In the Winbox: Goto Bridge Bridges
create a bridge say “bridge1”
double click bridge1 and set arp: proxy-arp to forward MAC
Goto Bridge Ports
add the AP interface to bridge1
add the NIC interface to bridge1
Then your MT unit acts like those normal basic APs you buy of the shelf. That is you Lan and WLan act as one device. Just remember to setup your MT unit’s IP on the Bridge1 interface and not the others.
I read something about 3.0 version that clients can be associated and dropped according to signal strength. Well, maybe that can help for roaming. It should take a bit of trial and error to get the signal strength value to set the MT AP to drop the client and another AP to pickup. Yet, maybe MT can add this as an extra interface type: similar to bonding or nstremedual where you can add interfaces, say we create a new interface call it “Roaming” where you can add multiple wlan interfaces with same ssid, different channels, and it will connect the clients to the best signal wlan interface automatically.
Hope this helps.