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I am looking for clarification on routing in wireless networks, and am specifically interested in the overhead in wds vs. ad-hoc networks, and how far up the protocol stack packets will travel that aren't intended for that particular router.

For WDS, I believe that each wds link will have its own L2 table of clients that are attached to that AP, but I am not seeing the difference between using WDS and Ad-Hoc, if each wireless router will be receiving the frames because of the nature of how the antennas are aimed in a mesh environment, (to allow all radios see eachother), and will hence be using CSMA/CA.

Is there any benefit to using WDS vs. Ad-Hoc in a pure mesh environment?

Is there any benefit to using WDS vs. Ad-Hoc where there is hidden nodes?

Thanks,

~omni

Hi Omni:

Your question prompted me to check on progress made for an IEEE mesh standard.

http://www.belairnetworks.com/about_belair/press_releases_view.cfm?p_id=34&blnArchive=0
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/Reports/tgs_update.htm
http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/mesh_cfp.htm
http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002814.html

I hope this helps. Can you add your location to your forum profile? Thanks. /criss