Cascading Routers Are Essential
If you started out your home network system with just one router and now have more devices that need to be connected you may need to have cascading routers. Cascading routers is basically a way of having two routers work together. The best way to have cascading routers is for one to be a wired router and the other to be wireless. This is because you need one router to be very stable and to be capable of doing most of the work. Wireless routers are no good for this; a wired router is the way to go as your main router.
Speed
Your primary router, the wired router, should be a secure one but it may not be the fastest router. Your wireless router will most probably be the faster one here. Though your second router need not be wireless, it can be a wired one too. Though it is important for the primary router to be wired. Choose routers that will give you high network speed and good network features. Otherwise you could be faced with a very slow connection.
Primary Router
When setting up cascading routers make sure that your primary router is the one that manages firewalling, filtering, DHCP, port forwarding, and logging. It is very important that your primary router handles the DHCP. Any ISP configurations, port forwarding and so on that is still on your secondary router needs to be transferred to your primary router.
Optimal Performance
For the best performance you should make sure that both your routers have the same IP block. Otherwise you will have trouble sharing files, and other computers on the same network will not be able to access all the resources on your network.
Secondary Router
As mentioned above you should have disabled things like firewall management and port forwarding on your secondary router. However you should leave a filter on your secondary router, only if it is a wireless router. If it is a wired router than the primary router should handle all filtering.
This keeps out any unwanted spyware or other intrusions on your network. To ensure that both routers can communicate you should add the LAN MAC address of your primary router to your secondary router. When configuring cascading routers you want to make your WAN as useless as possible. So set your WAN to a static IP address. Now you can set up cascading routers at home. It may take a little trial and error but you can do it.
