Wireless Distribution System




A Wireless Distribution System or WDS provides a wireless premise wide area network by extending and localizing the coverage. That allows mobile PC user to roam and stay connected to the available network resources.
A Wireless Distribution System is a system that enables the interconnection of access points wirelessly. As described in research 802.11, 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.[1] An access point can be either a main, relay or remote base station. A main base station is typically connected to the wired Ethernet. A relay base station relays data between remote base stations, wireless clients or other relay stations to either a main or another relay base station. A remote base station accepts connections from wireless clients and passes them to relay or main stations. Connections between “clients” are made using MAC addresses rather than by specifying IP assignments. All base stations in a Wireless Distribution System must be configured to use the same radio channel, and share WEP keys if they are used. They can be configured to different service set identifiers. Note that both routers need to be set to forward to each other in their WDS settings for it to work. 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 two raised to the power of the number of “hops”,[2] 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 AP would experience and a client two hops from the directly connected AP will see at most one quarter of the maximum throughput seen at the directly connected AP.
Wireless Distribution System (WDS) protocol allows wireless interconnection of access points. WDS can be used in combination with bridge mode to extend the range of a wireless network, without need for a wired backbone to link the access points. This can reduce the amount of cabling required, and extend the reach of your network into areas where cabling might be difficult or impossible.