How to communicate between AP and controller in realtime

For Developers
1

Hi all ,
is there any ready package for openwrt which can be used to establish real time communication between AP and WLC
just like MQTT protocol or something
currently there is a heartbeat interval of 2 minutes where AP sends data to WLC after every 2 minutes and if it fails to send data 3 times(6 min) then it will be considered as dead AP as per OpenWISP package .
but i want it to be even faster and send data whenever it has .

2

Is attempting to change the timeouts of OpenWISP not an option?
Why do you need this response time?

Can you use a different monitoring system and alert on that in terms of availability monitoring?

If I needed an action in openwisp with that sort of speed my first thought is I already have zabbix (or insert monitoring system of choice) and use the web hooks built into openwisp.

edit:

MQTT is exactly that, a protocol. I don't think the issue with OpenWISP is that it uses HTTP, SSH and ping. It's more of how the application is designed and the timeouts built in?

Sending data faster isn't that.

3

Sounds to me like this is a question for the OpenWISP folks, not OpenWRT.

2 Likes
4

as the controller is live on the internet and suppose an AP is in some organization. (having local ip with 192.168.xx.xx). so when AP sends msg to controller it uses NAT service and sends the msg with public IP , but the problem is when WLC wanted to send anything to AP. as the WLC does not have the specific device's IP

5

with use of MQTT , it is possoble to establish 2 way communication and also possible to trigger communication from WLC side(which is currently not happening by openwisp)

6

The solution to that in openwisp land is to set up a VPN or some sort of encrypted tunnel.

With NAT regardless you then still need to have the AP to initiate it client side then. (Unless you go for port forwarding with set ports per tunnel the other way?)

The solution for me has been a gateway in the network and then bridge/route that and then all the AP's talk through that bidirectionally through the VPN tunnel.

And that's if you MUST host your openwisp controller in the cloud. IMO You can run openwisp for small deployments with some swap and 1gb of ram. 2gb of ram with no swap is also achievable. Using a 10 year old tiny PC and/or cluster is more than sufficient. Some of the routers here on the forum have enough RAM to run it in a container / VM to....