Question about mesh wifi while in 2 physical networks while having 1 ssid

[Mon3]

We have 2 physical buildings that are physically close to each other and they have 2 separate Internet Gateways.

Each building has it's own internet and gateway. We need WiFi coverage outside and bough a few MR86's that we want to place outside, but it would overlap with our other building Meraki's.


We would like to run 1 Wifi mesh network, but our question is because AP's will be connected to 2 separate internet gateways how will the Mesh network work and handoff work? Thank You in advance.

Would clients drop if they go somewhere where there is coverage from 2 AP's that we have setup as one network in Meraki portal?

[alemabrahao · Accepted solution]

Deployment Considerations

There are several guidelines that should be followed to ensure a successful mesh deployment:

Wireless client handling on a repeater

VLANs and other SSID settings like firewall and traffic shaping settings will be maintained on SSIDs that are served by repeater access points. 

Gateway-to-repeater ratio 

In general, it is desirable to have as many gateway access points as possible to maximize overall network performance and reliability. As a general guideline, it is recommended to plan for no more than two repeater access points attached to each gateway access point.

Maximum mesh hops 

There will be a throughput reduction (~50% reduction) with each “hop” in a mesh. It is recommended that a mesh network be designed for no more than one mesh hop from the gateway to client device.

Multi-path mesh 

In order to ensure that there are multiple failover paths, it is recommended that each mesh access point has at least three strong “neighbors”, or other access points in the mesh that the access point can “see”. The Mesh Documentation gives an overview of the different monitoring tools available on the Meraki Dashboard, including an overview of the Neighbors Table. 

Ethernet bridging

The gateway access point may be configured to connect to a trunk port and trunk SSIDs to different VLANs. Repeaters will also serve SSIDs trunked on different VLANs. However, only one SSID & associated VLAN may be configured to bridge wired clients across a mesh link on a repeater access point's Ethernet port. A mixture of wired clients and Cisco Meraki access points attached to one MR repeater interface is not a supported deployment configuration. This is due to the auto detection mechanisms that Cisco Meraki access points use to infer when they should function as a gateway or a repeater.

Mesh wired access may be treated like a traditional point-to-point link with a router on the remote site. Access points may connected to a repeater with a Layer 3 router separating the broadcast domains. For further discussion on this design, see Extending the LAN with a Wireless Mesh Link documentation article. 

Wired clients are not subject to the same authentication requirements that wireless clients are subject to. Wired clients will bypass authentication methods such as PSK and RADIUS and gain network connectivity as though they had associated to the SSID.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Deployment_Guides/Mesh_Deployment_Guide

[Mon3]

Thank You so much for the such detailed answer and for the links. You went above and beyond!

[KarstenI]

With two gateways, I assume that you also have two dashboard networks. In this case the APs in the different networks will not mesh. The clients in the “middle” will have a bad time as they could change from one network to the other and each time they receive a new DHCP config and sessions will break.

[Mon3]

Ah, I see. Wanted to avoid the session breaking but you are right. The clients in middle and when going from one building to the next one will drop the session. We have some autonomous driving robots here that need wifi to work and when they lose wifi connection they stop until they get new wifi connection.