It is possible. The topology would be as following.
Notebook )) (( TL-WR1043ND )) WDS (( Wireless ADSL Modem Router --- Internet
Try to set up WDS with the following guide:
http://www.tp-link.com/EN/article/?faqid=227

I know that guide and that's how I did the setup so far. However, as I said, I'm able to ping the Wireless ADSL Modem Router from both my TP Link Router and Notebook, but nothing else works (e.g. accessing web-interface of the Modem Router just gives a timeout). I don't know though what could be wrong - DNS entries on my Notebook have been configured correctly through DHCP.

Did you have any luck? I recently bought this router to use this feature and I cannot make it work... I can ping devices on another router (Netgear) from TP-Link router. But not from my computer on the TP-Link router as it does not get IP address from DHCP on Netgear. So your case is better than mine. WDS's status on TP-Link is "RUN". Please post if you found any solution on this issue. Thanks.

thg wrote

Region : Germany

Model : TL-WR1043ND

Hardware Version : V1

Firmware Version :

ISP :

I'm trying to configure my TP-Link router to connect to my DSL modem router via WDS bridge instead of using the WAN port. Since I'm having issues with routing (ping works but everything else is not), I'm wondering if it's actually possible to use the WDS bridge in exchange for the WAN port. If so, how should I configure my WAN settings in case the the port is not used? (seems obsolete to me, but there's no option to disable it)

Thanks in advance,
thg

Notebook )) (( TL-WR1043ND )) WDS (( Wireless ADSL Modem Router --- Internet

When working on WDS mode , you have to disable the "DHCP Server" on WR1043ND, otherwise your notebook will get IP address/ Gateway from WR1043ND, so the default gateway on your computer is wrong, so you can't get Internet.

@honoda: nope, still no luck :(

@vic: As I already said, I followed the guide given in the second post. I also tried the "DHCP relay" function of my Wireless ADSL Modem Router, to relay the DHCP functionality to my TP-Link Router. Both options didn't work. I can even configure both Routers to provide DHCP (with different IP range) - setting the Gateway of the TP-Link DHCP to 192.168.0.1 (IP address of the other one). ipconfig in windows showed the correct ateway in all different configurations - but still it doesn't work. When I said, I was able to ping the gateway from my notebook, I wasn't able to reproduce that anymore. All my current tries only allow pinging the gateway from the tp-link router, but not from a device connected to the tp-link router (although it is correctly appearing as gateway in its corresponding IP settings).