[Babel-users] Restarting MeshPoint – seeking advice on routing for crisis/disaster scenarios

[Henning Rogge]

In my opinion the main issue with large scale mesh networks in the
Media Access... 802.11 is just not designed to work in dense
environments, especially without central control like an access point.
Decentralized Media Access is hard to get efficient and Adhoc mode
doesn't scale well.

For things like disaster recovery the range of (omnidirectional)
802.11 is also not good enough... but Wifi Halow (802.11ah) could help
with this... less data rate, but more range.

The only way I see to make a large-scale (high hundred to low
thousands of nodes) omnidirectional mesh work smoothly is to restrict
it to a very limited set of applications that don't overload the whole
mesh.

Henning Rogge

On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 3:03 PM Christof Schulze
<christof.schulze at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >PS: I would really, really love to keep a layer 3 option in Gluon
> >going. Also because I think it would be neat to compare the
> >different routing protocols in real world scenarios. With the
> >autoupdater and scheduled-domain-switcher it should be quite easy
> >to run a whole network on protocol a) for a month and protocol b)
> >on another. Without needing full central control, like SSH root
> >access (but it is an option; otherwise the autoupdater uses a
> >multi-party signature scheme, so you can say s.th. like 3 of these 10
> >people need to sign a new firmware). So, shameless promotion..., if
> >anyone here might be interested in maintaining a Babel or OLSR
> >implementation in Gluon, let us know :-).
>
> The main topic here is that the communities using it either have moved
> on (Frankfurt) or have dissolved (Magdeburg). At this point I am not
> sure who wants to continue with our experiments from 2019. Freifunk did
> work great with babeld and l3roamd. But there is another default
> already...
>
>
> Also, if we could find a great way to aggregate routes, that would be
> awesome.
>
>
> Regards
>
> Christof
>
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