User Guide

Chapter 7
Radio Frequency Management
Radio Frequency Management (RFM) is an advanced feature of MSR2000 that allows
automatic discovery and quality monitoring of wireless mesh links. RFM automatically
scans for neighboring MSR2000 routers and create automatic WDS interfaces. With
RFM, multiple MSR2000 routers can form a mesh network without any manually
configured WDS interfaces. In addition, an RFM-aware routing protocol could use the
link quality information from RFM to optimize the routing path in the wireless mesh
network.
Auto neighbor discovery and WDS link creation
RFM discovers neighboring MSR2000 routers using passive-scanning, a process that
is automatically started when a backhaul radio interface is operating without any
manually configured WDS interfaces. Passive-scanning automatically changes the
channel of the radio interface and listens for 802.11 beacons from other MSR2000
routers. If one or more routers are heard, RFM selectively attempts to create WDS links
with these other routers. Auto WDS interfaces are automatically created and configured
if the WDS connection is successfully established.
The configuration commands that controls auto-discovery is wds auto, which enables
Auto WDS discovery for a radio interface, and max-auto-wds, which controls how many
automatic WDS links RFM is allowed to create on that interface. If wds auto is not set
for a radio interface, RFM will not perform any scanning or WDS interface creation on
that radio.
WDS link quality monitoring
RFM could monitor the link quality for all WDS links present on an MSR2000 router,
regardless of whether the link is manually configured or automatically created. The
WDS interface for the link must be active
14
. The link quality is displayed in the results of
the “show interface dot11radio X wds” command:
MSR2000# show interface dot11radio 0 wds 0
Interface Radio0MWds0
admin status: up physical status: up neighbor ip: 10.1.6.1/28
rssi: 79, snr: 79, link quality: 91%, datarate: 60
remote mac address:00:0b:6b:35:36:bc, physical interface:0,
index 20 metric 1 mtu 2100 <UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>
HWmode: a, channel: 48, Fragment thr: 2346, RTS thr: 2347
HWaddr: 00:0b:6b:35:e8:5d
inet 10.1.6.2/28 broadcast 10.1.6.15
input packets 6077, bytes 1429442, dropped 0, multicast packets 0
input errors 0, length 0, overrun 0, CRC 0, frame 0, fifo 0, missed 0
output packets 6082, bytes 1602424, dropped 0
output errors 0, aborted 0, carrier 0, fifo 0, heartbeat 0, window 0
collisions 0
14
An active WDS interface is one that is bound to an active backhaul radio interface and not
administratively shutdown.
MSR2000 CLI Configuration Guide
39