Leaf or Middle AP Cannot Associate with the Root AP

Common causes:

• Signals are weak. The leaf AP and root AP are disconnected from each other easily, causing the leaf AP unable to go online.
• WDS configurations on the AC are incorrect, for example, the whitelist or bridge whitelist are incorrectly configured.
• Distance parameters on the AP are incorrect. As a result, the APs cannot set up wireless links.
• When a radar channel is configured, the WDS link becomes unstable, causing the AP to go offline.

Link establishment between the root AP and leaf AP is used as an example:

The root-middle-leaf networking can be considered as the combination of root-leaf APs (root-(leaf root)-leaf).

Therefore, the troubleshooting methods for root-middle-leaf scenarios are similar to the root-leaf scenarios.

The following figure shows the root-leaf networking. The WDS network is established through 5 GHz radio links.

In the networking:

• The root AP provides the VAP ath 30 for the leaf AP to connect to. The MAC address of the VAP is 10:1b:54:86:63:de.
• The leaf AP uses the VAP ath 31 to connect to the root AP. The MAC address of the VAP is 10:1b:54:9b:dc:1f.

• A single-band AP supports a maximum of 16 VAPs, with their numbers ranging from 0 to 15. The 16 VAPs correspond to 16 separate air interface addresses. The MAC address of the air interface increases by 1 based on the base address every time the VAP number increases by 1.

  If the WDS function is enabled, VAP12, VAP13, VAP14, and VAP15 are for WDS use only.

• A dual-band AP supports a maximum of 32 VAPs, with their numbers ranging from 0 to 31. The 32 VAPs correspond to 32 separate air interface addresses. The MAC address of the air interface increases by 1 based on the base address every time the VAP number increases by 1.

  If the WDS function is enabled on the 2.4 GHz radio, VAP12, VAP13, VAP14, and VAP15 are for WDS use only.

  If the WDS function is enabled on the 5 GHz radio, VAP28, VAP29, VAP30, and VAP31 are for WDS use only.

Radio calibration may change the radio channels and power; therefore, radio calibration may interrupt WDS or mesh services if implemented on radios that have WDS bridges or mesh links configured.