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General Information
Summary This manual discusses management of Atheros and Prism chipset based wireless NICs that comply with IEEE 802.11 set of standards. These interfaces use radio waves as a physical signal carrier and are capable of data transmission with speeds up to 108 Mbps (in 5GHz turbo-mode). MikroTik RouterOS supports the Intersil Prism II PC/PCI, Atheros AR5000, AR5001X, AR5001X+, AR5002X+, AR5004X+ and AR5006 chipset based cards for working as wireless clients (station mode), wireless bridges (bridge mode), wireless access points (ap-bridge mode), and for antenna positioning (alignment-only mode). For furher information about supported wireless adapters, see Device Driver List
MikroTik RouterOS provides a complete support for IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking standards. There are several additional features implemented for the wireless networking in RouterOS - WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), software and hardware AES encryption, WDS (Wireless Distribution System), DFS (Dynamic Frequency Selection), Alignment mode (for positioning antennas and monitoring wireless signal), VAP (Virtual Access Point), ability to disable packet forwarding among clients, Nstreme wireless transmission protocol and others. You can see the table of features supported by different cards. The Nstreme protocol is MikroTik proprietary (i.e., incompatible with other vendors) wireless protocol aimed to improve point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless links. Advanced version of Nstreme, called Nstreme2 works with a pair of wireless cards (Atheros AR5210 and newer MAC chips only) - one for transmitting data and one for receiving. Benefits of Nstreme protocol: - Client polling. Polling reduces media access times, because the card does not need to ensure the air is "free" each time it needs to transmit data (the polling mechanism takes care of it)
- Very low protocol overhead per frame allowing super-high data rates
- No implied protocol limits on link distance
- No implied protocol speed degradation for long link distances
- Dynamic protocol adjustment depending on traffic type and resource usage
Quick Setup Guide Let's consider that you have a wireless interface, called wlan1. -
To set it as an Access Point, working in 802.11g standard, using frequency 2442 MHz and Service Set Identifier test, do the following configuration: /interface wireless set wlan1 ssid=test frequency=2442 band=2.4ghz-b/g \
mode=ap-bridge disabled=no Now your router is ready to accept wireless clients. -
To make a point-to-point connection, using 802.11a standard, frequency 5805 MHz and Service Set Identifier p2p, write: /interface wireless set wlan1 ssid="p2p" frequency=5805 band=5ghz \
mode=bridge disabled=no The remote interface should be configured to station as showed below. -
To make the wireless interface as a wireless station, working in 802.11a standard and Service Set Identifier p2p: /interface wireless set wlan1 ssid="p2p" band=5ghz mode=station disabled=no
Specifications Packages required: wireless License required: Level4 (station and bridge mode) , Level5 (station, bridge and AP mode) , Levelfreq (more frequencies) Submenu level: /interface wireless Standards and Technologies: IEEE802.11a, IEEE802.11b, IEEE802.11g Hardware usage: Not significant Related Documents Description The Atheros card has been tested for distances up to 20 km providing connection speed up to 17Mbit/s. With appropriate antennas and cabling the maximum distance should be as far as 50 km. These values of ack-timeout were approximated from the tests done by us, as well as by some of our customers: | range | ack-timeout | | 5GHz | 5GHz-turbo | 2.4GHz-G | | 0km | default | default | default | | 5km | 52 | 30 | 62 | | 10km | 85 | 48 | 96 | | 15km | 121 | 67 | 133 | | 20km | 160 | 89 | 174 | | 25km | 203 | 111 | 219 | | 30km | 249 | 137 | 368 | | 35km | 298 | 168 | 320 | | 40km | 350 | 190 | 375 | | 45km | 405 | - | - | Please note that these are not the precise values. Depending on hardware used and many other factors they may vary up to +/- 15 microseconds. You can also use dynamic ack-timeout value - the router will determine ack-timeout setting automatically by sending periodically packets with a different ack-timeout. Ack-timeout values by which ACK frame was received are saved and used later to determine the real ack-timeout. The Nstreme protocol may be operated in three modes: - Point-to-Point mode - controlled point-to-point mode with one radio on each side
- Dual radio Point-to-Point mode (Nstreme2) - the protocol will use two radios on both sides simultaneously (one for transmitting data and one for receiving), allowing superfast point-to-point connection
- Point-to-Multipoint - controlled point-to-multipoint mode with client polling (like AP-controlled TokenRing)
The MikroTik RouterOS supports as many Atheros chipset based cards as many free adapter slots are on your system. One license is valid for all cards on your system. Note that maximal number of PCMCIA sockets is 8. Some chipsets are not stable with Atheros cards and cause radio to stop working. MikroTik RouterBoard 200, RouterBoard 500 series, and systems based on Intel i815 and i845 chipsets are tested and work stable with Atheros cards. There might be many other chipsets that are working stable, but it has been reported that some older chipsets, and some systems based on AMD Duron CPU are not stable. Only AR5212 and newer Atheros MAC chips are stable with RouterBOARD200 connected via RouterBOARD14 four-port MiniPCI-to-PCI adapter. This note applies only to the RouterBOARD200 platform with Atheros-based cards.
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