Hello All,

     Posting this as I did too much work, research and testing to find the answers you need to configure this device.

First it IS a device worth its price.  It took my living room connectivity from 40 Mb/sec to 140 Mb/sec on a 200 Mb/sec ISP service.

Next is how it works so you can configure it (not posted anywhere I can find).

 

The RE315s biggest advantage is its "High Speed" feature and the one that makes it work.

This feature enables a 2.4 Ghz standard narrow bandwidth (wide area) wifi signal to be retransmitted at 5 Ghz (small area) wide bandwidth frequency.

In auto mode the extender uses its own algorithm to determin what signal it uses to transmit to the router but this can be set manually.

The alternate band is disabled in manually set mode so is unusable to connect to clients.

Now the details.

 

The RE315 uses its hard (hard coded and published on the box) mac address to transmit to CLIENTS.

It also uses this same mac to connect to any device through the supplied LAN port.

To connect to the router it creates two 'virtual mac' addresses in the format 12-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx and 16-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx where the x's represent the remainder of the hard mac address.

The 12- address is used for 2.4 Ghz communication and the 16- is used for 5 Ghz communication.

The router sees the virtual address connected with its assigned IP PLUS the router sees one additional listing with the SAME MAC ADDRESS and DHCP (from router) assigned IP FOR EACH DEVICE connected to the extender.

The extender does NOT pass hostname to the router so your router will identify it either with an * or UNKNOWN.

The extender holds its own translation table for conversion of communication from the router back to the client when a response is received. 

Because this is the way this device works I found out the hard way you cannot BIND the primary address of the extender as it must be free to create new virtual mac addresses.

This was done to ensure I had a fixed IP address to connect to the extender with for configuration but found a reservation is all that is needed.

As DHCP is passed through from the router there is no need to make (nor can there be made) any reservations for the clients using the virtual mac.

Any existing reservation made on the router will work fine.

As this is the case no testing was or will be done on the extenders DHCP capabilities and it is set disabled on my extender.

If you use mac address filtering you will need two listings for mobile devices that will connect to the extender and router seperately.

One address will be the devices hard mac and assigned IP address and the other will be the virtual mac for the band your extender is connecting to the router with and the devices assigned IP.

Otherwise while moving and transitioning between access points the device will drop connection.

ARP Binding as previously mentioned cannot be done for the hard mac address of the extender but appears to work fine when set on the router for connected devices.

Just remember that DHCP is DISABLED for any client whose address is bound so you must configure the connection on the client as well.

 

I was considering citing my sources but this article has gone on long enough!

Hope this saves you at least some surfing for answers.

 

SteveNeo