E@zyVG’s Vichar::World Connected

Great article on how to set up WDS at home with minimum cost and running the DD-WRT modified firmware. DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many 802.11g wireless routers based on a Broadcom chip reference design. For a list of supported devices, please see the Supported Devices page.

Here’s a rough draft of our home’s floor plan. It’s absolutely NOT to scale and doesn’t show all areas. You will see on this diagram the location of the primary AP (A) and of the second AP (B) that I added as a WDS node. More on that follows below.

I’d picked up a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router on Ebay some time ago and had put it away as a spare if anything should happen with my main router.

This weekend I decided to use it to set up a Wireless Distribution System (WDS) in my home to fuller home wireless coverage. Plus, I love doing projects like this!

First things first, by definition a WDS is a system that enables the interconnection of access points wirelessly. It allows a wireless network to be expanded using multiple access points without the need for a wired backbone to link them, as is traditionally required. WDS may also be referred to as repeater mode because it appears to bridge and accept wireless clients at the same time (unlike traditional bridging). It should be noted, however, that throughput in this method is inversely proportional to the number of “hops”, as all traffic uses the same channel. For example, client traffic going through one relay station before it reaches the main access point will see at most half the maximum throughput that a directly connected client would experience.

Article and HowTo 

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.