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Transparent Bridge w/ Atheros CM9

Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 9:50 pm
by iellison
From what I have read so far in this forum, I still have not found a solid answer to this question. Using 2.8.26 with Atheros cards, is there a way to do a transparent point-to-point bridge without using WDS? My understanding is that WDS is essentially halving my available bandwidth, which at half duplex is already half of what is reported. This should be a simple and common setup, but I have been unsucessful in doing it. Thanks in advance for any information.

Re: Transparent Bridge w/ Atheros CM9

Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 8:17 pm
by REDTDI
From what I have read so far in this forum, I still have not found a solid answer to this question. Using 2.8.26 with Atheros cards, is there a way to do a transparent point-to-point bridge without using WDS? My understanding is that WDS is essentially halving my available bandwidth, which at half duplex is already half of what is reported. This should be a simple and common setup, but I have been unsucessful in doing it. Thanks in advance for any information.
Have thought about using an eoip tunnel?

Ken

Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 9:21 pm
by wildbill442
halving your throughput?

Never seen anything like that when using WDS.. and what are you comparing it to that it's halving?

Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 9:25 pm
by eflanery
WDS is lighter weight than EoIP, so you should get better throughput with WDS.

WDS only cuts the bandwidth in half if you are using it as a "repeater", i.e. the packets need to egress via the same physical radio they came in on.

All WDS really does, is to expand the 802.11 header a little bit, by adding a few extra fields to carry the actual source and destination MAC addresses (and a few other flags and such) in addition to the BSSID MACs (thus making transparent bridging possable). This does cut the potential bandwidth by a bit, but not much.

EoIP re-encapsulates the entire ethernet frame inside an IP packet, so you would be adding two complete headers to each packet.

With straight 802.11 you have: IP over 802.11
With WDS you have: IP over "chubby" 802.11
With EoIP you have: IP over Ethernet over IP over 802.11.

--Eric

Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 11:41 pm
by wildbill442
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=3467


scroll down to my two posts at the bottom...

WDS does not halve throughput... it adds a slight bit of overhead, but its not halving your throughput by any means.

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 8:35 am
by dan_99503
I'm surprised that that it requires EoIP or WDS. But I guess it's similar to what the other solutions are doing as well.

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:18 am
by john2
802.11 protocol does not have facilites to do 802.1d bridging unless you use WDS -- it is that simple. Of course, we can bridge over any IP link when using EoIP -- and that includes wireless 802.11 links with an AP and a station.

John