Setting up WiFi extenders... is it possible to daisy-chain them?

Solution 1:

Extenders typically are nothing but Wireless Access Points - with two radios if they are any good. The difference to a "classical" access point configuration would be that their upstream link is wireless - similar (but not necessarily identical) to the Universal Repeater Mode. Under performance and reliability considerations, an access point should be connected upstream by a wired link. Where this is not possible and if your requirements permit it, you can do a radio-to-radio forwarding by the means of "extenders".

As each extender creates an own collision domain, you could daisy-chain them indefinitely - pretty much as you could do with wired switches. Obviously, round-trip times would increase for the connected clients as each hop would add to latency. The address conflicts reported by the host may be arising from either a true address conflict (something is claiming the IP address the host wants to use and responding to ARP who-has requests) or a network loop where the ARP request from the host would be reflected back to it, answered and the answer reflected back as well - which would look like another host is claiming the address, while in fact it would just be a looped back transmission.

Whether or not your extenders would have any issues with setting the extended network's SSID to the value of the uplink's SSID would be implementation-dependent. Basically, the extender has to be smart enough not to try to connect to itself or any of its downlinks (so it needs to have some idea about the topology) for this to work.

As the wireless infrastructure set up in this way is a pain in the arm to manage - especially when you are changing the PSKs of your wireless networks (it looks like you are using PSKs, so you must be changing them frequently, right?), you seriously should be looking into vendor-specific WDS systems where you would not need to touch every single device in the right order to get your keys changed without interrupting connectivity for your management data path.

Solution 2:

You don't want to do this. Since you're not using WDS, the extenders have to impersonate their clients.

A WiFi access point will not bridge to a WiFi client. If you don't set up WDS, each repeater is a client of the upstream access point. The upstream access point will only send packets addressed to its clients over a client link, and clients of the repeater are not clients of the upstream access point, so it will not send their packets to the downstream access point. To get around this, extenders impersonate their clients.

This creates all kinds of problems. Among other things, it prohibits seamless roaming because the real client would conflict with the impersonated client.

Your choices that actually work reliably are either WDS or wiring the access points together.

Solution 3:

I would think that, if your extender is intelligent enough, you should be able to assign static IPs to each extender that should help the flow. Also only altering the routers SSID for the extenders will help:

IE; Router dSSID= Home >> Extender 1= Home-1 >> Extender 2= Home-2 etc

Sometimes a Bridge Mode, if available, will assist in this procedure.

Lastly I'm hearing good things about the APs that use your home AC wiring but they are expensive and I like performing a good kludge where ever possible. There could also be a lot of signal noise/interference depending on the age and quality of your AC infrastructure not to mention your neighbors AC age/quality and usage. I've lived in some rentals that had really dirty power due to age and the tech available at the time they were built.

YMMV, so good luck and be creative. I do work as a Sr Systems Admin in a HA large scale datacenter wearing many hats; primarily server/infrastructure operations with Windows 2000 thru 2016, many flavors of UNIX and Linux and the chief backups/restores SME and antivirus applications SME. Been around the block, but certainly haven't see it all or know it all, just enough to be the go to guy for just about everything, putting out fires and cleaning up the persistent problems that the app developers create that can be a good way to not get any sleep when I'm on-call. Keeps me busy and always learning and hacking so I like it.

Good luck and happy hacking!

-Dexter