Two routers configuration for Smart Home

When setting up the smart home system using WIFI as the core network infrastructure, it is important to split the surfing traffic and smart home traffic. This will ensure that the smart switches respond timely.

For my smart home setup, I have used 2 Asus routers (RT-AC1200G+ & RT- AC68U), one is configured as the main the other configured as the slave. There is no reason why a particular model is chosen as it is based on what I have on-hand but it is better to have dual-band routers because I will have 4 separate bands (Two 5Ghz and two 2.4 GHz) of network bandwidth.

The router is configured as a Master-slave mode with different subnets and network route is added to make sure that the traffic can flow both ways. The smart switches are all connected to a dedicated 2.4 GHz bandwidth and the remaining 3 bands are for normal surfing.

For normal surfing, in order to the client devices to automatic connect to the strongest signal frequency, all the SSIDs have to be the same. So the client device will automatically connect to the strongest signal router.

For some reason, setting up the static route in the web interface does not enable the routing. A separate route has to be added to the iptables by Telnet into the console. The following are the commands to set the iptables:

# to list all the forwarding rules
iptables -L FORWARD -v

# add an entry to allow all traffics between the 2 routers.
iptables -I FORWARD 3 -i br0 -o br0 -j ACCEPT

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