View Full Version : Does WDS "route"?
sure-data
09-13-2003, 08:11 AM
I've read the proxim docs on WDS.
I'm looking at a bandwith issue here. If you have AP's four deep, do they ALL repeat everything? Or, does the traffic "stop" at the AP where the destination is?
Our WDS implementation learns where the traffic is going, and only repeats it as necessary to get to it's destination. If you have a WDS link 4 deep, and WDS4 talks to WDS3, then only those two will see the traffic. Multicast traffic (ARP requests, NetBIOS probes, etc) will be seen on all WDS systems.
Note that WDS links will halve the traffic with each hop, which means that downloads from WDS4 to WDS1 will be quite low. (as shown in the Proxim DOCs)
Thanks!
georgew
09-14-2003, 05:03 PM
The main limitation of WDS is airtime. Each link in a WDS chain is sharing the same channel, so the bandwidth available on the channel is divided between them.
In other words, WDS has a bandwidth issue as you mention.
If you are wondering why you can only get a megabit through 4 WDS links, that can individually do 5 megabits, the answer is 5 divided by 4 is 1.25... A megabit is all you have left after WDS gets finished with you.
Use dual radio relay routers for full thruput.