Main WDS station:
One of your WDS stations is the main base station forthe WDS
network. This AP is connected directly to your Internet
connection,or connected to your router via a wired connection.
The main stationis the bridge to your Internet connection that all
wireless trafficeventually flows through.
Repeater WDS stations:
In a simple, two-AP WDS network, the other“unwired” AP is a
repeater. The repeater receives data from the mainbase station
and relays the data to the wireless clients associated to
therepeater station (and vice versa for data coming from the
clients). If youhave more than two APs, remote APs may be
repeaters, or they may berelays that provide an intermediate
stopping point for data if therepeater is too far away from the
main station to communicate.
When you configure your main or base WDS station, take note
of the channelyou’re set to and the SSID or network name of
your network. If your AP hasany kind of channel auto
configuration function that changes channels basedon network
conditions, be sure to disable this feature. If your main WDS
stationis also your network’s router, make sure it’s set up to
distribute IPaddresses in the network.
Write down or otherwise take note of the MAC addresses of all of
your WDS stations — many configuration software systems
require you to know these addresses to make the configuration
settings work. Write down the wireless MAC address (it’s often on
a sticker) and not the Ethernet MAC address.
Turn on the WDS functionality in your main station (it’s often
labeled WDS,or may say something like Enable This Base
Station As a WDS Main BaseStation — that’s the wording Apple
uses for their AirPort Extreme products).When you turn on this
functionality, the configuration software may ask youto identify
the remote repeater(s). Have the MAC addresses of
thoserepeaters handy in case you need them.
Depending upon how your software works, you may have to
separatelyaccess the configuration software on the remote
repeater APs to turn onWDS. Here are a few things to
remember:
You need to assign any other WDS stations to the same
channel that yourmain base station is using. This is
counterintuitive to many folks who havehad the 802.11b/g
“use channels 1, 6, and 11 and keep your APs on
differentchannels” mantra driven into their heads for a long
time!
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