Wireless Repeater and Hotspot

RouterOS General
1

Hi all,
i would like to receive an explanation about an issue that I’m experiencing.
To summarize: I have a wireless access point (not mikrotik) and a wireless repeater connected to it (unfortunately WDS is not available).
On LAN side of AP i have a routerboard with hotspot functionality.
For client connected to AP everything is ok, but if they connect to repeater only one can connect, the second one pushes out the second, i understand that this is because I have configured only one address per mac on hotspot configuration.
The thing that I don’t understand is on the attached picture:

  • The client connected to repeater has mac address 54:e4:xxxx, the repeater itself is 80:3f:xxxxx
  • why DHCP is released to client mac address but on hotspot it is recognized with the repeater mac? and why it is marked as “dynamic”?
    Repeater.png
    Another question: do you know any repeater that clone the mac address of the client? and that does’nt send the packet with his personal mac?

Thank you very much

2

Hi,
I would like to bring up this thread again.
Did you find any solution?
Thanks

3

Search the internet for description of WiFi bridging problems.

Short version of story: WiFi bridging is not really standardized and can not work in a way that WiFi connection would be truly transparent. WDS tries to fix that problem.
Reason being that WiFi standard frame has only place for 3 MAC addresses: BSSID, sender MAC and receiving station MAC. If receiving station is also destination of a given packet (e.g. WiFi laptop or smart phone), then this is enough. When creating transparent WiFi bridges, fourth MAC address would have to be transmitted: when transmitting from “master” AP towards client beyond WiFi repeater it would be the MAC address of final recipient of packet, and when transmitting from client beyond WiFi repeater towards “master” AP it would the original source MAC address.

There are a few vendor-specific workarounds and they tend to work only if both APs (on both sides of wireless bridge) are by same vendor.
One of workarounds is for WiFi repeater to do kind of “MAC-NAT”, replacing original sender’s MAC address with its own … then all the clients behind that kind of WiFi repeater would appear to be single client with the repeater’s own address. While this might work fine even for more than one client for usual traffic, it breaks DHCP (and possibly some other) service.