I currently use 4 wire attached Linksys/Belkin E8450 OpenWrt AP's with Fast Roaming support (no WiFi Mesh). I would like to support a remote building that is 50' away that has a POE ethernet switch that supports two cameras. Currently using a Asus RP-AC52 Media Bridge but am very unhappy with the duplicate mac addresses, and performance. AFAIK I have four options, WDS/Ethernet Bridging, RelayD, separate routed network, 802.1s mesh. Since I have few VLANS the WDS/Ethernet bridging seems to be the most attractive IF my chipsets will support it. I plan on using a WHW01 that I have flashed to OpenWrt for the remote bridge. Based on your experiences what are the downsides of this approach
WDS/ 4addr would be the easiest/ fastest option, if both ends are running OpenWrt - it won't transport multiple VLANs on its own, though (but neither do the options, some mesh implementations might). VLANs would require something like GRE tunnels on top of the wireless link.
Do not expect too much from this setup though, indoor routers and omni-directional antennas are not a great solution to connect buildings (and this adds to external walls at least). Outdoor APs with directional- ('wireless wire') or segment antennas would improve the situation considerably.
802.11s plus batman-adv.
I worked on this project the past weekend. The end result is that I was able to estabilsh a WDS bridge using another E8450 with OpenWRT successfully. I was unable to make the WHW01 using OpenWrt work following the exact same config guidelines. Per the Status pages, the Master and the WHW01 associated with each other but I was unable to pull a DHCP address across the link, nor was I able to ping the static IP of the WHW01 (it is in the same subnet of course). So a plus for getting a solution, a minus for not being able to reuse the two WHW01 that I have. As a side note, is there someplace that can show compatibility between chipset types (atheros,Qualcomm, etc) and WDS?
Thought about this and tested adding a static address to the device adapter I was pinging from and it worked! So the apparent real issue is why DHCP requests are not working across the bridge. If anyone has any suggestions as to DHCP config tweaks for this please let me know. The master is running as a strict Dumb AP, all DHCP and DNS is happening on my MicroTik router.
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