Need separate network for home automation.

[OklahomaGreyBeard]

I am having issues with general traffic on my network and it's effects on my home automation devices. I'm also seeing the more I add, the slower it's getting. My main issue though is when I have three rokus streaming from my plex server and I tell the home automation server to adjust lights or blinds etc, it will either take forever or just not do it at all.

What I'm thinking is placing a second router behind the first that all the home automation connects to (some hard wired some via wifi). Then have all the media and other devices (laptops, phone, tablets, etc) just on the first. The home automation server as well as a few devices need to access the internet and since the server is headless, I need to access it from my laptop on the primary network.

My question is will this work to keep the media and downloading traffic away from the HA gear and how do I tell the primary router to send any requests for the sub network to the secondary router rather than the WAN?

 

[Urumiko]

That could be a long thing to answer. and the best solution depends on whats using the bandwidth and where your bottleneck is.

first off the simpler or at least cheaper solution if the wifi is the main bottleneck, would be to get a top end home wifi access point which supports similtaneous dual band N or AC, then move all the bandwidth heavy stuff like streaming to the 5ghz channel, and keep all the low intensity stuff like the automation on 2.5ghz. Note before you do that you need to check which modes your kit supports as a lot of older stuff doesnt support 5ghz. (edit)- theres no technical reason you cant have all the kit on 2 seperate 2.5ghz channels but it tends to be saturated by neighbours and can cause issues with streaming.

1) you could also have 2 home style wifi routers running independantly and linked via an ethernet cable on the lan ports, if you turn off DHCP on the 2nd router but keep the access point running on another channel you will have effectively created 2 wireless switches on the same network, this will let you get the same bandwidth sepearation as above.


If you wanted to go all out seperation you need to effectively have 2 lans or vlans, and there are 2 ways to do that.

2) if your routers support configuration of static routes or a routing protocol such as rip you can connect them via ethernet and have them function as seperate networks, but you need this feature to do it.

3) The 'propper' enterprise style solution would require the follwoing shopping list:

either

a small business router with at least 3 ethernet ports, an autonymous similtaneous dual band wifi access point, and a couple of cheapo switches to give you more ports.

or

a basic home router, a layer 3 switch (to allow inter vlan routing on the switch), and n access point to cover whichever channel your home router is not.

both of these solutions would probably run you about £300 buying from e-bay.

 

[Alabalcho]

- cascade second router to the first (WAN port of Router2 goes to LAN port of Router1). Assign static IP address to the Router2/WAN from Router1 LAN space, and exclude it from DHCP (e.g. limit your DHCP scope to 1..100, and place Router2/WAN at .200)
- on Router2, set up port forwarding if necessary (e.g. port 1081 to port 80 on Device 1, port 1082 to port 80 on Device 2, etc)
- when you need to access Device 1, go to http://192.168.0.200:1081