Wireless distribution system or other wireless mesh implementations

[Karl Haines]

I'm looking into doing a wireless mesh setup. I've been looking into WDS,
which is supported by the dd-wrt firmware I'm currently planning to use on
these routers. So far it looks like it should do what I want, but there will
be some hits to performance, as always.

Has anyone here used WDS or any other wireless mesh systems? Any advice
and/or opinions?

Thanks in advance,
Karl Haines

[Chris McQuistion]

I've used it with DD-WRT and Tomato firmware.

What are you trying to achieve?  Specifically, do you need to extend a wireless network with wireless access point to access point communication or do you have the capability of running ethernet to each WAP?

Chris

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[Karl Haines]

Chris,

 

I’ll be running Ethernet to the ones that I can obviously, but I’d like to add a few where I can’t run Ethernet, like across the street, etc. I’m creating a little neighborhood hotspot here, and I’d like to be able to reach as far out as possible. We’ll be investing in some omni-directional antennas as well. Anyone who as experience with that, please speak up as well!! Thanks ;)

 

Karl

[Chris McQuistion]

I personally prefer Tomato firmware over DD-WRT, though DD-WRT does let you do more tweaking.  I have used WDS on both and they work about the same.  Here is a link to the Tomato FAQ that talks about how to set it up.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomatofaq#how_do_i_use_wds

We have a campus-wide wireless network, now, but we don't use WDS any more.  We simply run ethernet to every WAP and assign the same SSID and password and encryption to every AP and put them on different channels if they are close enough to detect each other.  This works far more reliably than WDS.  In a WDS setup, you have two points that can get messed up and you cut the bandwidth in half every time you have to hop from one WAP to another WAP.

Chris

[Mark J. Bailey]

I 2^nd that approach!  I have only used WDS in small, controlled settings, but, it was fickle at some point in time it always seemed.  Nice idea, but….  I am sure higher end WDS implementations might well be more robust than a WRT-derivative, but, as Chris notes, home-running to each WAP will probably be more reliable in the long run.

[Steven S. Critchfield]

Depending on time frames and ability to play, you might want to check
out

http://www.villagetelco.org/2008/06/the-origin-of-the-mesh-potato/

I saw this recently in a magazine, and it sounds like it might be just
what would be interesting to your neighborhood.

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[Karl Haines]

Chris, I was reading about the 50% bandwidth per (non-ethernet) hop the other day, which was one of the performace issues that I had noted in my original post. Really a crappy little quirk. Anyway, If you aren’t sharing files over the network, only browsing, which would need only 2mbps or so, seems like the hops wouldn’t hurt too much. Not sure, I guess I’ll just have to try…

[Don Delp]

The OLPC uses a network mesh similar to this. I don't know if I've
seen the stats on how it affects them. Then again, if you're 9 wifi
hops away from a dialup adapter, can you tell?