[Freedombox-discuss] We do need mesh networking

[Michael Stone]

Luca, Michael, and friends,

Here are a couple of brief thoughts and clarifications for you on the subject
of mesh networking.

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 17:59:06 UTC, Luca Dionisi wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Jonathan Roberts <jonrob.one at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On this topic...
>>
>> from what I've seen of previous discussions, some people are very
>> knowledgeable about mesh networking so this may not be of
>> news/interest, but I'm pretty sure the OLPCs have mesh capabilities.

The OLPC XO-1 computer included a Marvell Libertas 88w8386 baseband processor
with firmware that implemented some features of draft versions of the IEEE
802.11(s) spec. OLPC has also made use of the "Salut" mDNS/link-local-XMPP
Telepathy connection manager, mostly on top of 802.11b/g ad-hoc networks, on
both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5. 

>> They might be good people to talk to about protocols/techniques, and
>> their software for it is almost certainly open source.
> 
> Their mesh capabilities are those of standard 802.11s. For what I know they
> should have a big limitation in the number of nodes they can scale up to. 

This matches my experience. 

(That being said, I'll add in the margins that I've had pretty good experiences
with several other sorts of mesh technology like cerebro, batman-adv, and olsr
in appropriately scaled applications.)

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 18:49:22 UTC, Michael Blizek wrote:
> I have not seen *any* ready-to-use of meshing so far that is very scaleable.
> In order to scale, you basically have to limit the depth of routes you
> discover and the length of routes you take. Otherwise in average, everybody
> needs to forward more data compared to the amount of data end nodes can
> send/receive.

In the years since my time with OLPC, I have found this paper:

   "Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks", 
   http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.28.6218 

to be a good explanation of some of the underlying issues. 

Do you have any competing citations that I might add to my library?

Regards,

Michael