I have to preface this by saying that I have not yet installed openwrt on my router, I'm just wondering if it has the functionality I'm looking for.

I set up my WR1043ND router to act as a WDS bridge between my local Ethernet network and a wifi network (public network, but with portal login) I have access to. My problem is that the connection is cut every day, approximately. I have tracked down the issue to the wifi network's channel, which seems to change regularly (there are multiple antennas in the network). Changing the channel manually in the router's web interface, to match the wifi network fixes the issue.

The default TP Link firmware doesn't seem to be able to match the wifi network's channel automatically, when it changes. I would like to know if openwrt can do that, before flashing my router.

(Last edited by JMuller on 17 Sep 2017, 20:00)

Hi JMuller, in theory OpenWrt / LEDE should be able to do it. At least with the fully supported Atheros wireless drivers.

The WDS client mode in one side should be able to connect configured with the SSID used on the other side (WDS AP), the same as a regular wireless client.

Regards.

Thank you for your quick answer ! I'll have to try out openwrt, then. I look forward to it .

When you set up a STA (client) interface or a STA-WDS, the default is to search through channels until an AP with matching SSID is found.  Optionally the BSSID (AP's MAC address) can be specified if there are multiple AP's with the same SSID and you want to always connect to a specific one.  If the connection is lost, the search resumes and automatically re-connects, possibly on a different channel.  So this should work for your application. 

If you have a local AP on the same radio, it will go off the air until the STA is acquired.  Then it will resume operation on the new channel.  Since there is only one hardware RF section, all signals to or from the same radio have to be on the same channel.

Thank you for the advice. I've flashed my router with LEDE (openwrt doesn't support v4 of the WR-1043ND). It works perfectly. I can even use 192.168.0.0/16 addresses in my LAN now, instead of using the same IP subnet as the wifi network.
Love it. It's been difficult to figure it out, but definitely worth it .