Hostapd with bonding

[Ed W]

On 07/04/2011 23:33, Antonio Iglesias wrote:
> If I set up three AP on the server, each with a different channel, a
> client only can communicate with one AP, and then bonding has no sense
> for me. I want a client can communicate with any wireless NIC on the
> server, because they must are seen like one only AP. Bonding must handle
> traffic over NICs on server to increase throughput or to do load
> balance, because he can decide what NIC is free at moment of transmit a
> packet to a client and can have more packets on air at the same time.
> 
> It's a hard question, I know, but I think it's possible to do it.

I don't see that what you desire is possible.

1) The clients only have a single radio card, hence it's impossible for
them to tune to more than one freq at the same time

2) The only way you can increase bandwidth is by using multiple
frequencies.  Give or take a possible slight increase in efficiency,
it's not possible to simply run three radio cards on a single freq and
somehow squeeze more bandwidth out of the one freq

Therefore you cannot increase the speed of a single radio card in the
client by tweaking the AP (if it were possible then the manufacturer
would have already done it)


Your only options are:

a) Put multiple radio cards in the clients and tune them all to
different freqs (remember there are only 3 non overlapping freq options
in the 802.11g range).

This *might* give you more speed than a single radio card, but every
client shares the combined bandwidth of those three frequencies, so this
doesn't scale beyond three clients and even at three clients you are no
better than using one radio card in each (on separate freqs)

b) Single radio card and find some way to allocate clients to APs in
some efficient way (idea presented previously)

I think if we are talking about more than a couple of clients then this
is your only option.  Note that bandwidth is not magically multiplied
because you have more radios in the room (in fact the opposite).  So
video streaming is likely to be limited


The key issue here is that radio is a *shared* medium.  You have three
non overlapping "g" frequencies, each freq has a nominal max bandwidth
and that's your entire amount available for all clients...  Sure there
might be some tiny amounts of efficiency in using multiple clients, but
roughly speaking the capacity is fixed and as you add clients the
capacity is divided

Good luck

Ed W