Understanding Mesh Networking (feat. MikroTik Audience)

hey there my name is gary sims and this is gary explains today i want to talk about tri-band mesh networking and do that i'm going to be using the micro-tick audience which is a tri-band mesh networking setup and we're going to learn about the difference between mesh networking and simple wi-fi repeaters wi-fi range extenders and to see what you can do with a mesh network that you can't do with a much more simpler equipment so if you want to find out more please let me explain so i hope you've had a chance to watch my video about wi-fi extenders and how they really work that really is good background information will help you understand what we're talking about in this video i won't repeat much of the information so if something doesn't seem clear to you best to check out that other video so today we're gonna be concentrating on tri-band mesh networking and why having that third band is really important now before we get into that let's look at the four advantages of having mesh networking as compared to a simple wi-fi range extender so the first big difference is the fact that you can have a backhaul connection and we're gonna talk more about that in detail but a way for the different nodes in the mesh network to be able to communicate with each other the second thing that is important in a mesh network you can have multiple nodes and those nodes are aware of each other in the terms that they can route traffic through the best route back to the original modem or router that gets you on to the internet or access to the rest of your lan network and they can work together in a kind of as a group rather than each one just being individual and just blindly kind of rebroadcasting or transmitting data in a mesh network they can work as a as a cohesive group together which leads to the third point which is configuration because they're working in a group together because they are aware of each other because there is intelligent software used for the routing and so on that same software is also used for configuration so when you configure the network you can configure it with just one node that you connect to and then that node is able to pass on the new information to the other nodes and the fourth thing that's important about mesh networking and it's true this is only found in some types of mesh networking is this idea of fast roaming the ability to switch from one node to another without any kind of interruption so let's talk about those four points in greater detail starting with the backhaul now the backhaul is the way that the nodes in the network can communicate with each other now there are three different types of backhaul system that exist in a mesh network and the first is there is no backhaul there is no dedicated backhaul method at all and what that means is that the radios inside of the mesh network are used both for talking to the clients and also for talking to the other nodes including transferring the client data to the different nodes in the network and that is very similar to what you have in a simple wi-fi range extender one radio has to be able to receive and also has to be able to transmit and that gives you a problem with bandwidth because it can't do two things at once now you probably have multiple radios because you probably have 2.4 gigahertz support and five gigahertz support inside of your mesh network and that would mean that it can be a bit cleverer to understand that it can send some data over five gigahertz while it's using the 2.4 but ultimately if you've got more people using your network your household has got several people in it then there's the same channel is being used for the data uh for between the nodes and for the clients and that will end up being a bandwidth bottleneck now the second type of backhaul and this will overcome this network bottleneck is to have wired connections so each node in your mesh network actually has a wire running between it an ethernet cable and therefore when the data is sent let's say you've got a smartphone you're streaming a video it goes to the node in the mesh network then the next hop of the journey the next stage of the journey goes over a wire between the different nodes in the mesh network and then ultimately arrives at the router or modem that gives you access to the internet or to the rest of your lan now of course that's great and that gives you brilliant performance but of course one of the reasons why you're probably using a mesh network is that you don't have ethernet cables all over your house you don't have that kind of infrastructure which allows you to connect them otherwise if you did you may not even bother to use a mesh network you may have used different uh ideas like just connecting an access point in another room over the ethernet connection so although that's a great way of getting a good bandwidth you probably aren't doing it for that reason you've probably bought mesh network because you want to go wireless completely and the third way to handle the backhaul problem is to use a dedicated radio so the mikrotik audience is a tri-band so it has three different radios in it now the first radio is for the 2.4 gigahertz network so 80 to 11 g n and so on then there's a second radio for 5 gigahertz so 82 11 a and ac and then there's a second 5 gigahertz network which is separate to the other two which is dedicated just so the nodes can talk to each other what that means if i'm connecting to a local node with my smartphone i'm streaming a video for example when that node then wants to talk to the next node it won't be using the same five gigahertz radio that the smartphone is talking to the node because if it did it would have to switch between sending and receiving sending and receiving set receiving and sending the data from the smartphone and then sending it on to the next node and of course that cuts the bandwidth in half so instead it has a third radio dedicated just for talking to the other nodes so now i've got great bandwidth coming through to my smartphone and there's a separate channel backhaul that's being used to talk to the other nodes in the network and that's great for bandwidth in fact we're going to show you some of my bandwidth testing that i've done and it's actually amazing when you see i had to double check my numbers because it really has a great effect on the overall bandwidth of the system now before we get into that bandwidth testing let's quickly look at the other three points i made the second one being that of course there are multiple nodes so you've got a simple wi-fi extender it's just broadcasting blindly it's not aware of any other extenders around it there could be one in the next room it doesn't care it just transmits now when you've got a mesh network they understand what they're doing and they are controlled centrally from the main mesh network controller and it's able to understand the best route to any particular node it's able to understand which one is busy because it's got a lot of load onto it switch to a different path if one of them is no longer connected to the power the data can be re-routed so the smartness of being a mesh network means that they are able to work together as one network and they aren't just blindly doing each one of these own things a team so this is a team rather than a single player so since they are working together as a team it means that you can have some really quite strange topologies that's kind of the way you arrange your network so you can have outlying nodes you can have nodes two or three that are maybe closer to each other and the network won't just try to route things all the way around all of the different nodes and finally get back to the main router it understands well just one hop here will get me to that client with these you know the smartphone streaming the video i don't have to worry about going out to that one at the extremities it can be intelligent in the way that it routes that information around so because all those nodes are playing together as one team not only is the data being rooted intelligently around the different nodes in the network also the configuration information can be sent around the different nodes in the network so for example using the my critique audience i wanted to change the wi-fi password so using the app that they've got on smartphone android and ios i was able to connect to the main node and i was able to change the wi-fi password and that information then trickled its way through to the other nodes in the network i didn't have to go to each node and reconfigure it and change it and test it it just works because it's central management so it's a great thing particularly if you've got you've got one or two okay but you're stuck in three four of these things then it would be really handy to be there to manage it all from a central point and that's what you can do and the final point is seamless switching between the nodes now if you remember from my previous video on network extenders each node is actually its own physical wi-fi network with its own bss id and if you don't know what that means go back please and have a look at that other video now when you switch between them that's normally based on the client device or your smartphone saying well the signal is stronger here than over here so i'm going to switch now of course the ssid and the password are the same so it's able to switch fairly quickly however there is a technology that allows you to switch without there being any interruption and this requires some authentication keys that are pre-shared so that of course when you connect to the new node the authentication is already working and it requires support not only in the device uh the mesh network but also in the client device so in the smartphone that's where it gets a bit tricky ios kind of supports it samsung device and android support other android devices don't really support it then of course you've got laptops and you've got you know windows mac os and you've got linux and so on we're talking about things like 802.11.rkv now if you want a separate video on this file switching do tell me in the comments below and i'll think about doing a separate video but it's not really a coherent technology at the moment you have to have support everywhere for it really to work okay so now let's look at the advantage of tri-band when it comes to that backhaul and the throughput now similar to i did my testing using the wi-fi extender i've got uh the one audience unit here in my office and we can look at a map in a moment and then i go around my house trying different combinations to see what effect it has on the bandwidth now let me tell you one thing before we get cracking i'm going to be talking about uh percentage differences so the base will be the speed that i can get right next to the or audience unit connecting to my performance testing which is here in the land not related to the internet because that would be unreliable it's here inside of my house but the thing to start with is that because this is wi-fi five in other words 80-11 ac and it supports of course 2.4 gigahertz with uh n and so on i was actually getting three and a half times the performance that i was getting just using my normal 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi 11n network so already just switching to the audience i was already getting three and a half times the bandwidth by upgrading to this great piece of equipment now you'll see in a moment when we go then to extend that using another audience unit the great things that we have using the tri-band okay so here is that pseudo picture of my house again and as we can see here bottom left hand corner is the audience unit and i get 100 that's the bandwidth baseline here connecting to that now if i move across the hallway into the bedroom and i try to connect back to the original audience i have a bandwidth now of 69 and that's a drop-off because of five gigahertz of course going through several walls as a distance and so on so we're now at 69 percent but if i connect in a second audience unit into that room and then it is using its radio to talk back to the first audience unit i get a throughput of 75 percent so it's actually faster using the second audience unit and this is very different to what we saw when we were using a simple wi-fi range extender because a wi-fi radio extender as i said is trying to listen on the radio and talk on the radio the same frequency 2.4 gigahertz or whatever it's doing and it can't handle it but now we've got the the audience with its tri-band three bands it's able to use those radios as it wants to get the best throughput possible so it's even better than just using my smartphone in that room because the audience itself is able to use that backhaul and it can actually look and say well i've got some free bandwidth on 2.4 gigahertz i've got some free bandwidth on the other five gigahertz channel and it can do its best to give you the best throughput so just by putting in that second audience unit across the room i got a faster higher bandwidth than if i connected just with my smartphone and that's the key with this that extra third radio gives you that extra capacity to be able to communicate between the nodes and so now if we moved up into that room in the top right hand corner and i'm connecting using my smartphone the bandwidth drops down way down now to ten percent now of course that is quite a low number but of course it's going five gigahertz so of course these signals drop off much quicker five gigahertz going a long way to the other end of the house to the original audience unit now if i connect to the audience that's connected into that first bedroom then now this actually bumps up the speed to 27 percent and what's interesting is still to remember that that number of 27 because remember this network was giving me three and a half times more than what i was getting on my my previous uh eight to 11 uh n network 2.4 gigahertz end network that throughput connecting through to that second audience is actually faster than what i was getting on my old network actually next to the router with the phone next to the router so again just that three and a half times bump in performance even when you start to that comes down because of walls and because of distance i'm still getting much greater bandwidth than i was on my previous device but there's even something better coming up next listen to this if i then connect a set an audience unit into that room itself and then i connect to it and then it talks over its back haul and its other radios back to the original audience i get a throughput of 60 60 so now that i am way way away i'm still maintaining a 60 bandwidth and here again we see the advantage of the tri-band because that third band is there for the two audience units to speak to each other so while my device is talking to the local unit over five gigahertz it doesn't have to kind of you know multiplex its radio to talking to my smartphone and talking to the other unit it can talk directly over that third band and also if there is any other bandwidth available for example on the 2.4 gigahertz range then it can control those radios as it sees fit to get the best kind of performance so this is very very different to what we were seeing with just the simple wi-fi extender so i was amazed at the other end of the house that i'm actually now still getting sixty percent of the bandwidth because i have that local audience unit and then the back hall is handling the traffic going back to the original one so what have we learned we've learned several things first of all having a tri-band mesh networking is way way more superior than using just a dual band or even a single band mesh networking because they will be forced to use the same radios for both the backhaul and for the communicating with the client device secondly we've seen things like the ability to add in two three or even more a audience network node will allow you to have smart routing and smart uh configuration so these things work as a team and not just as an individual hogging the radio waves as they're trying to do their thing they can work together and the other thing we've seen is that configuring a mesh network is very easy because they're playing together as a team when you configure the main node it is able to pass on that configuration information to the other nodes in the network so some great advantages both in terms of performance and in terms of management from using a mesh network particularly a tri-band mesh network than using just a simple wi-fi extender okay that's it my name is gary sims this is gary explained i really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more of these kind of videos please do tell me in the comments below and if you want to see more of my videos then it's best to subscribe to the channel and hit that bell notification icon because not always will the recommendation algorithm tell you about my stuff okay that's it i'll see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 14,217

Rating: 4.9635415 out of 5

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, Mikrotik Audience, tri-band, mesh networking, dual-band, Wi-Fi, Wi-fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, wifi 4, wifi 5, meshing, Mikrotik

Id: mOiu9fgOhFo

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021