WDS Questions

[Foamz]

I've read a few articles on WDS and even on wikipedia, but there is still a few questions I need answered...

In a mesh setup, wont alot of AP's in WDS mode slow down the network?
I know with a normal AP setup, the speed goes down when serving more clients at a time.

2nd question: Lets say the network gets kinda big and you start running out of IP addresses, will it be able to use different IP ranges and route to each other?

Last one: Can you limit certain protocols/ports to certain speeds on a mesh? This is so that shady characters does not go ape on downloading iso's or chatting whole day over VoIP/video.

uhmm, thats about all i have to ask for now :p

[Rory]

This is all just as far as I know.

1. Yes, WDS is slow and not suitable for a mesh. It can however be used in small cells like if you can connect to mesh but your neighbour can't.

2. Yes.

3. I don't think without expensive hardware. Also since it's community owned each person owns their own AP etc so it's not something you can control much. It shouldn't affect you TOO much unless you are acting as a transit, in which case you can control the bandwidth.

[Foamz]

1. Yes, WDS is slow and not suitable for a mesh. It can however be used in small cells like if you can connect to mesh but your neighbour can't.

If i'm reading that right, do you mean that there are other ways of setting up a mesh? If so, what are those methods?

-edit-
Maybe I should also ask: How are you guys of ctwug doing it?

[Rory]

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_protocols_implementations

There's lots of ways of doing a mesh network. Not sure what ctwug uses. I think jawug uses OLSR and not sure about ctwug.

[Foamz]

Thanx Rory.
I think I'm going to try and drop daffy or rodent at jawug a mail and ask them for some pointers.
Dunno if the big guns of ctwug reads this, but I would to know what they use and how you manage it.

[Mufasa]

I've read a few articles on WDS and even on wikipedia, but there is still a few questions I need answered...

In a mesh setup, wont alot of AP's in WDS mode slow down the network?
I know with a normal AP setup, the speed goes down when serving more clients at a time.

2nd question: Lets say the network gets kinda big and you start running out of IP addresses, will it be able to use different IP ranges and route to each other?

Last one: Can you limit certain protocols/ports to certain speeds on a mesh? This is so that shady characters does not go ape on downloading iso's or chatting whole day over VoIP/video.

uhmm, thats about all i have to ask for now :p


1. the more clients on an AP will slow it down, at our high sites we are using routerboards running mikrotik, so the WUG would have to grow very quickly and have plenty clients on them before having to worry about that. WDS is not the way to go, we had some linking in WDS mode but the performance was not up to scratch. With links running in WDS mode, the bandwidth if halved with every hop across a WDS link

wds ap1 ----------- wds ap2 ------------- wds ap3


so the wds ap3 would only get 1/4 of the available bandwidth to wds ap1(savage correct me if I am wrong)

2. Ip ranges, we are using a /28 range which gives you 14 ip per user and 4096 subnets, long time before ip addresses become a problem if ever.

3. On the wug so far we have had to limit ftp (looks at savage). On the routerboards/MT you can limit/shape it pretty much anyway you want to per subnet or ip. On the wrt it depends on the firmware you have flashed to the router, I know dd-wrt has some Qos built in and if you use open-wrt and like tc you can build your own Qos tables.