General Information - MikroTik RouterOS v2.9 Reference Manual

WDS Station
Virtual Access Point
Nstreme
Dual Nstreme
WEP Security
WPA Security
Troubleshooting
Description

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
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
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.
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Device Driver List
table of features supported by different cards.