Maximum bandwidth with multi-hop setup

General
1

Hi,
I’ve been working on a network extension setup where we need to bounce around a hill.
My initial setup was a mesh system A→B→C however due to the 50% bandwidth loss this didn’t end up having a high enough data rate at point C.
My next change was to add an extra device so we could link 2 dedicated p2p pairs A→B C→D this however was difficult to setup and the way I ended up getting it stable still seemed to have performance issues.
Do you have any advise or guide to step through setting up a paired link like this? In a range of setups that I understood should work produced no connectivity even when the home page uplink on device C confirmed connection.
Many thanks for your help.

2

As long as everything is bridged, the main advice with a paired setup like that would be:

  • choosing a different channel for C→D vs A→B so they don’t interfere (e.g. in the US, choosing 12 and 44 may be best)
  • making sure B and C are not too close to each other for best results (TBH I don’t know how big the effect would be here, but people inside the company said ‘don’t do that’ when I started mumbling about a dual radio setup in the same device)

Then, an ethernet cable between B and C should be fine. Just make sure C is in ‘share with upstream network’ mode, then connect the WAN port of C to any of the ports of B.

Can you give us any information about the sort of performance/stability issues you’re seeing?

3

Thanks James,
I thought that would work too initially however any method I used in connecting unit B to the WAN of unit C showed that the unit had an uplink but any connection downstream didn’t get connectivity. I got it working eventually by bridging LAN to LAN with Ethernet however the link from C to D still had a significant performance hit beyond normal radio interference.
Would there potentially be a conflict by having units A and C both in AP mode? Changing the default IP on unit C would be a relatively simple solution if that was the cause.

I’m finding that a dual band setup will be critical in maintaining usable bandwidth over long distances, getting the initial link positioning right isn’t always possible and a lot of building types are problematic with RF transmission. I would think for an integrated dual band setup the transmitters need at least a 16cm spacing which would be tricky in a small unit like the HalowLink1.

4

Just adding an update on this post.
I had another go at the 4 device setup, the initial issue I was having on router C was resolved by changing the device sebnet, this resolved a routing loop that had been created.
After I changed the device C subnet I didn’t seem able to get a pair happening between device C and device D so I manually adjusted device D to connect to device C’s Halow network using the quick config page (pairing could be unrelated though).
The network setup is now much more robust however download speeds on Device D are still lower than I would expect (about a 45% drop occuring over the link, despite the LuCi interface showing a strong uplink connection), upload speeds are higher and inline with what I would expect but hard to tell if it is related.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the update; sorry I haven’t had time to look into it further. I’m actually quite interested in the approach, and none of our automated test rigs are setup in this way at the moment, so when I get a chance I’m hoping to mess around with it.

Sorry about the bad pairing experience; not sure why that would happen. If you’re having issues with pairing, the system log should explain what went wrong (accessible via the UI or running logread).

If you can easily do a dump of the uci files in /etc/config from all 4 devices so I can make sure I can replicate the setup, that would be helpful, but you may want to sanitise it (i.e. strip the passwords etc.).

6

That might take a while to get the UCI dumps, the site is not a place I travel to often. So instead I’m happy to add as much implementation detail as I can remember. The setup isn’t exactly standard.

  • Device A has an uplink through an existing WiFi connection, this device is set into a mesh networking mode as that was the original setup (I cant remember exactly which one).
  • Device B was paired with device A, this was part of the original mesh network setup.
  • Device C was reset and left in standard AP mode, I changed the IP address to 192.168.13.1
    The uplink was Device B LAN ethernet to Device C WAN. Halow set to AU channel 44.
  • Device D was reset and set to IP 192.168.14.1 so I could control the connection without loosing access to the router.
    On the Quick config page, I manually changed Halow from AP to connect as a Client. Scanned for the Device C network and entered the credentials.
    I might have set WAN → LAN and LAN→WAN as well. It is not bridged as I couldn’t see a simple way to do this through quick config.

Happy to provide some more information, if there is a way that might be able to improve the bandwidth from D→ C then I would be really interested.