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I have 3 wireless cameras connected to my home network that record to a LAN connected VCR. There is a LOT of traffic from these cameras and cause bandwidth issues when streaming video from the internet. I have a Netgear N600 router and wondering if I could set it up as an access point and connect my 3 wireless camers to it and the VCR to a LAN port on that router and that would remove the traffic from the network or is still going to flow back through my modem/router anyway? The modem/router is a DSL Q1000.
Welll it is time to close out this issue, so here is the answer....
It actually was a simplistic fix - just keep all the cameras and NVR (network video recorder) all on the same router. So I used a WMDR3700V2 router set as an AP then one LAN port went back to the modem/router, one port went to the NVR and then the wireless cameras were all attached to that same router. Now all the traffice stayed on that router yet I could get to all the devices from anywhere on the house LAN. The problem before was that I had the NVR at the other end of the house on the LAN and so all the camera traffice passed through the modem/router and reduced the BW for other competing devices. Some times a problem that seems complex and difficult turns out to be easy. Thanks for all your comments......
I think hayhand has the right idea, however it’s not a case of taking the cameras off the network, but segmenting the LAN using the switch ports of the N600 (which model?). This would have the effect of keeping all point to point network traffic between recorder and cameras away from PC – Internet traffic.
I have eight IP cameras currently active with about 10 switches distributed around the house, camera traffic is kept away from other areas quite well.
Thank you for your response. My first setup was to make a separate LAN using just the Netgear router but connecting it via the WAN port back to the main modem/router. That gave me access to the rest of the network and the internet and kept the cameras on their own LAN. Of course I could get out of the camera LAN but could not get into it from the outside world. I did want to access the VCR from outside but that appears to be a problem at this point. The N600 is a WNDR3700V4 model. I will probably keep the setup the way it is but I am going to re-config one camera and the VCR and change the router so it is an access point and then watch the activity both on that router and back on the Q1000 modem/router (and attached switches) to see where the majority of the LAN activity occurs.
OK, the point about using network switches, and the router has a four port switch, is that point to point traffic is directed. So for example if a DVR is connected to port 1, and a camera to port 2, then the point to point traffic that the camera sends to the DVR will not be seen at ports 3 and 4.
Well in that case you would still want to separate traffic. So with the ‘3700 set up as an Access Point as you suggested, with the DVR connected to one of its LAN ports then traffic should not be visible at the other LAN ports. But unless the Q1000 is also wireless then the camera traffic will be using up WiFi time, and whether that’s an issue or not depends on what other WiFi devices you have and what you do with them. If you want to also stream data wirelessly to other devices then maybe use another separate AP, or if those devices are 5GHz capable use that band on the ‘3700 (assuming 2.4GHz would be used for the cameras).
That's kind of where I was going with my question. Could you not create an isolated AP, with a different subnet (or same subnet of the two networks don't meet), different SSID for the camera's and have the VCR connecting to one of the LAN ports, of the isolated AP? The reason why I asked if the camera's needed to talk to anything on the Internet (updates etc), as that part would have to be done manually, but you would have no camera traffic on your local LAN segment.
Thank you for your comments on this, I really appreciate it. I have several different approaches to try now and with some new insight on how this works I'm sure I will find the right combination. I actually have 2 other APs besides the Wifi on the modem/router and they are all on separate channels and have their own SSIDs. I will work on this in a few days as I move kind of slow (I'm 80) and then report back on what I finally learned and what the final setup turned out to be.
I suggest that you do some research into Ethernet Switches, the routers' LAN ports are an Ethernet switch. See how these can be used to separate traffic flow over a LAN and then I think you will find that the solution is actually quite simple, especially since your cameras are wireless.
This might help;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_switch
“Microsegmentation
Segmentation involes the use of a bridge or a switch (or a router) to split a larger collision domain into smaller ones in order to reduce collision probability, and to improve overall network throughput. In the extreme case (i.e. microsegmentation), each device is located on a dedicated switch port. In contrast to an Ethernet hub, there is a separate collision domain on each of the switch ports. This allows computers to have dedicated bandwidth on point-to-point connections to the network and also to run in full-duplex without collisions. Full-duplex mode has only one transmitter and one receiver per "collision domain", making collisions impossible.”
Welll it is time to close out this issue, so here is the answer....
It actually was a simplistic fix - just keep all the cameras and NVR (network video recorder) all on the same router. So I used a WMDR3700V2 router set as an AP then one LAN port went back to the modem/router, one port went to the NVR and then the wireless cameras were all attached to that same router. Now all the traffice stayed on that router yet I could get to all the devices from anywhere on the house LAN. The problem before was that I had the NVR at the other end of the house on the LAN and so all the camera traffice passed through the modem/router and reduced the BW for other competing devices. Some times a problem that seems complex and difficult turns out to be easy. Thanks for all your comments......
