Bridge 2 wifi without any wired

How can I create a bridge between two wifi networks without including any wired connection in the bridge?
I tried creating a bridge in Interfaces / Devices, but wifi networks are not listed.
Thanks.

What you want is called "wireless bridge" or "Wireless Distribution System". I have trouble setting up such bridge for my virtual machines on Ubuntu lately, and it turns out to be a known issue. To support this, the wireless radio must support 4 MAC addresses in the 802.11 packet:

  1. Transmitter Address (TA): the address of the transmitting access point
  2. Receiver Address (RA): the address of the receiving access point
  3. Source Address (SA): just like the source address in 802.3 packet
  4. Destination Address (DA): : just like the destination address in 802.3 packet

Even when both end support 4addr mode, I've heard that there are many different implementations of WDS, which are incompatible with each other. That's all I know until now, and save my research to another day.

On OpenWrt, looks like the situation is not much better: the OpenWrt device which connects to a Wi-Fi network has to turn itself into a router to allow devices on its own subnet to connect to the Wi-Fi subnet (read here). It cannot work as a bridge to connect two Layer 2 networks wirelessly.

Above is just what I have after doing my homework. I hope someone can come up with better answer and solution.

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Just bridge to a VLAN/interface and don't specify a physical switch port. Simple.

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I am afraid it doesn't work. ip link set dev "wlan0" master "br0" always fails, at least on my computer with a Wi-Fi adapter. On OpenWrt you use uci (and LuCI), but it has to interact with the kernel anyway. If it is a technical limitation, changing the user space tool won't help.

???

Since I use the UCI, I wouldn't be able to help on that. This is an UCI example:

config device                         
        option type 'bridge'              
        option name 'br-guest_net'        
        list ports 'eth0.x'    
                                          
config interface 'guest_net'              
        option device 'br-guest_net'
        option proto 'none'               
        option type 'bridge'              
        option ifname 'eth0.x'

From here, you can add an SSID to this interface/network.

It will need to have the switch connected to the CPU for WiFi, though.

Create a bridge. Don't add any ports. Create a network interface for that bridge with protocol Unmanaged (or proto none in the CLI).

Then configure wifi. The network should exist first so you can select it from the wifi side.

A regular STA client can't be in a bridge. A STA (WDS), AP, or mesh point can be in a bridge.

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I didn't understand. It seems to me that you are talking about a hardware implementation.
I just want to set up a wireless LAN on both wifi interfaces (2.4GHz and 5GHz) with the same DHCP and gateway, so that clients can connect to any one of them and use the same static IP lease.

I'll need more details. How do I create a VLAN interface?

See Post No. 5. Let me know if you have questions regarding the instructions in the post.

This works perfectly! I used a "static" interface instead, with "force link" enabled.
I didn't expect to be able to create an empty bridge. What a complicated way to set up a wireless bridge!

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