Good morning,

I really hope you can help me.

We have two Mikrotik Audiences, we use wifi2 on both devices as a dedicated link between them.

Previously we had Audience1 as AP and Audience2 as station-bridge.
However, this has now been changed to MPLS with VPLS, with Audience2 now as a station.

This was to resolve airtime being wasted with multicast traffic, being sent at a much lower data rate.
Although this has resolved issues of hung webpages, the throughput has gone down from 400Mb+ to around 200Mb.

The bottleneck being MPLS traffic being de-encapsulated on a single core.

Am I doing this in the most efficient way possible? As it seems to me I'm not.
I could have also overcomplicated something that should have been simple.

This was to resolve airtime being wasted with multicast traffic, being sent at a much lower data rate.
Although this has resolved issues of hung webpages, the throughput has gone down from 400Mb+ to around 200Mb.

I haven't tested it, but did you try multicast-enhance=yes? This wifi option converts multicast to unicast avoid the data rate dropping for multicast. Presumable similar to older multicast helper, but dunno.

I did experiments on Audience bridging a while back (before station-bridge was added), so I know VXLAN and EoIP worked too. See viewtopic.php?t=180369. Although I'd never tried MPLS. My fear is they'd all use the CPU more a station-bridge. But perhaps VXLAN can use multiple cores or more efficient than MPLS, but I don't know. VXLAN does have good controls (albeit complex) over multicast.

Thanks for taking the time to reply @Amm0.

MPLS was the easy option, as it allowed me to make use of the layer2 MTU, leaving the MTU for clients at 1500.

Part of me just wants someone to say, client-bridge takes care of all of this, you're wasting your time. However, I must say the network has been allot better since making the change, it's just at the expense of speed, which is a real shame.

It's great having all these dials to change, however, when we don't know an answer to something, it can lead us down a rabbit hole.

I did some experiments a while back, kinda came to same conclusion. It's funky, but actually works. Old CAPsMAN used DLTS tunnels to the controller, so tunneling traffic over Wi-Fi isn't exactly that funky.

If familiar/using with MPLS elsewhere, all links being the same has some advantage. Theoretically vendor-agnostic since it does depend on anything other than standard Wi-Fi AP & client.

Real world test is often the best judge. With Wi-Fi, instability gets you in more trouble, than max speed IMO.