Latest routers are all coming in with this great feature called the WDS (wireless distribution system). But not much know about what this feature is all about. To add  that, there are about a million search pages trying to tell how to set this up, but believe me, they're just copied shit from manufacturer sites, pissing people off because you end up setting nothing.

To get started with it, let's think logically what it does. To make things simpler lets say we have a working wifi internet connection. We can call this wifi access point as ROOT ROUTER. Now at the other end of the house I am unable to get wifi connectivity because the ROOT ROUTER is at the other end. Now how nice would it be, if a repeater router is there in between these two so that it can take connection from the ROOT ROUTER and relay it in it's range. Sounds Fun!.

Now 3rd party firmwares like DD-WRT come with a dedicated repeater mode, but I think stock firmwares have been having these features since 3-4 years but was not advertised much or maybe properly. Just for demo purposes I am going to use two wifi routers. At the ROOT position I have a TP-LINK TL WR841N and on the REPEAT position I would make use if TP-Link TL WR340G. Both of these routers are fantastic and are around 2-4 years old and come with WDS support

To make use of WDS the configuration needs to be done in following ways:

ON THE ROOT ROUTER (TP-LINK TL WR841N): 

• Go to wireless->channel, I select 11 (choose any channel, which looks free)\
• Go to network->lan setup IP address, I use 192.168.0.1 (as I have my adsl modem running on 192.168.1.1)

ON THE REPEAT ROUTER (TP-Link TL WR340G):

• Go to wireless->channel, select the same as on ROOT
• Go to network->lan setup IP address, I use 192.168.0.2 next to the root
• In DHCP settings change default gateway to 192.168.0.1 (ROOT ROUTER's address)
• Go to wireless, enable WDS. you can use SSID (wifi name) and BSSID (wifi's MAC address) manually or the TP-LINK has the survey feature using which you can search for root wifi.
• Once selected enter the security details of the root wifi ( as you would do while connecting any phone/tab/laptop )
• Once done you should be good to go.

Note 1:

 Set both of your wifi routers to have the exact same name, exact same authentication method and exact same authentication key. Doing this will make sure all your devices will see only one wifi network through out the house. And configuring one on your machine makes sure you configured  the other too.

Note 2:

Make sure the dhcp settings on both are identical, you would need to have starting address > 192.168.0.2 as the first two addresses are occupied. You can access both routers on 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2

Note 3:

WDS will cut the supported bandwidth by half on each hop. In my case the ROOT router supports 300Mbits. The REPEAT router supports 54Mbit. Since the slowest is the network speed and it was to be cut by half on hop. The supported speed for any device connected to REPEAT router would be 27Mbits. But that does not matter as I have a 2mbit connection. It will only matter if I have a connection >27mbit or connected more routers to hop on.