Bonding two wifi interfaces (2.4 + 5.8) in STA mode, anyone success?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have a couple of APs around my home that act as repeaters.

They connect to an AP further up the line in WDS mode.

For fun I tried yesterday bonding both their 2.4 and 5.8ghz interfaces.

Generally, it worked out fine. Since I was just testing I did most of the commands by hand but essentially I did the following on the client end:

  1. Connect each band to the parent AP, but set the network parameter to 'wifi0' and 'wifi1' so that the adapter does not get bridged with br-lan. This part I left up to /etc/config/wireless.

  2. Create bond0 interface using ip command and set it to round robin via the sysfs interface.

  3. ifconfig down phy0-sta0 / phy1-sta0.

  4. Add phy0-sta0 and phy1-sta0 to bond0 using ip command.

  5. Add bond0 to br-lan using brctl command.

At this point everything worked. I could see traffic coming in and out of each interface with one major exception:

Loads of missed icmp echo requests and between 20-40mbits throughput. Just generally very slow and unstable. Not a range issue btw the 5.8g band from the same location does about 250-300mbits when used not in the bond.

I also noticed that in ip a the wireless interfaces would show "NO-CARRIER" on and off again.

I also noticed in /proc/net/bonding/bond0, Link Failure Count would increment non stop for each of the interfaces at a fairly slow but steady rate. Equal for both interfaces.

Any ideas if this is at all possible?

Thanks!

2

Nice idea. Both links (2.4 and 5.8ghz) are WDS client right ?
I was thinking about bonding ETH and WDS when I find a while.

3

Yes both were in WDS mode.

I tried again yesterday. Same result.

Generally speaking it works... Just poor performance. I tried changing a bunch of the settings of both the wireless interfaces as well as the bond0 interface but same result.

I can hit about 30-40mbit sort of stable in bond mode.

Without the bond the same location does about 200mbit on the 5ghz band.

4

Hey! Just trying the same, have you found the best solution? I tried "luci-proto-bonding" package but wifi device is just restarting as soon as it connect to AP. It is in WDS mode.