[H] Wireless Bridge with two routers

weaksauce

369 Posts

August 31 2009 22:31 GMT

Hello, I'm at my wits end here so i thought id ask the all powerful tl.net

I recently installed tomato on two compatible linksys routers, and want my network to look like this

Unfortunately, I am having no luck getting the second one set up with WDS. I have gotten my xbox online using different settings on the second, but it seems like WDS is the way to go so i can enable security. I even went here for help

http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?p=351546#post351546

A long shot, but any help/troubleshooting tips would be much appreciated.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

August 31 2009 22:55 GMT

Hm this is kind of tricky, good question. Theoretically this should work fine, but it's difficult for me to analyze because I'm not sure exactly what Tomato (and all those custom firmwares) are calling "mesh" or "wds", and how they are implementing them. A lot of times, what they are calling some functionality is some kind of ghetto implementation that doesn't exactly what it means in academia. So somebody with more practical experience with these routers should do a lot better than me.

But my question to you is why you really want your laptops to be able to connect to either wireless router. A much simpler solution would be to have the secondary router simply be a ethernet bridge for the xbox (and not allow laptops to connect to it). Do you really need the range of the primary router (the one connected to the modem) extended that badly?

I don't want to be patronizing here, but do you realize that adding an extra hop (laptop -> router 2 -> router 1 -> internet) cuts down performance in general? It's not just the signal strength to the router that matters.

Example:
Your laptop can connect at 24 Mbps to router 1 and 54 Mbps to router 2. Router 2 connects with router 1 at 54 Mbps. I would take this as an "ideal" scenario for a house of moderate size, where you think you might be getting the most improvement. In this case, you'll actually achieve higher data throughput ("bandwidth") connecting with router 1 directly than going through router 2 to router 1, because the relaying from router 2 to router 1 (and back too! for the ACKnowledgment of every packet you send) takes extra time and the physical link rate is not exactly the actual data rate.

edit: Example 2:
Your laptop can connect at 48 Mbps to router 1 and 54 Mbps to router 2. Router 2 connects with router 1 at 54 Mbps. This is also a typical scenario. Your laptop might choose to connect to router 2 because the connection to router 2 has higher signal-to-noise ratio. But by doing so, you'll get about half the throughput you would have if you just connected to router 1.

edit2: Of course if you're in a spot where you get a stronger signal from router 1, it doesn't matter which configuration you have as you'll just connect directly to router 1.

Unless you get a very bad signal to your router from your laptop at some areas in your house and somehow you have great connections at every hop along the potential multi-hop route, it's actually hurting you to set it up as above, with router 2 acting as a mesh relay. Of course if you have a large house or multiple floors with thick walls etc. you might really need both routers to get signal at all.

weaksauce

369 Posts

August 31 2009 23:02 GMT

yea Myrmidon, makes sense... I think ill just drop this WDS and go back to setting the second as a wireless ethernet bridge, and try to figure out the security thing.

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[H] Wireless Bridge with two routers

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