WDS Broadcast interface?

Joe Parks jphstap
Thu Sep 11 10:16:43 PDT 2003


Suppose I have hostap running on a machine (A) that has 2 WDS
connections to 2 other machines running hostap (B, C).

Now suppose I want to broadcast some packets from machine A so that BOTH
machines B and C get copies of those packets.

Currently I have to send those packets through both WDS connections
separately, since each one represents a point-to-point connection, even
though they are using the same channel and SSID.   

This means that what is essentially the same packet must be transmitted
N times for N WDS connections when 1 transmission should have sufficed.
(I hate to see bandwidth wasted like this)

This situation is pretty much forced by the structure of WDS headers
because even though the DESTINATION address may be FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF the
RECEIVER address is that of the radio at the other end of the
connection.

So now I'm wondering what would happen if an additional interface were
set up that sends WDS frames to RECEIVER address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF ?

Is that a violation of the 802.11 specs for WDS?  Is there a chance it
might work anyway?   Or is there possibly another way to do this?

I can imagine that the 802.11 need to ACK each frame might get in the
way of this working, but isn't there already a mechanism for broadcast
packets in the spec for Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure modes?   Could the
same mechanism be used for WDS?





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