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First TMPLAB Wireless Battle Mesh – April 11-12th 2009 @ tmplab

We are pleased to announce that the /tmp/lab  will be organizing a Spring Wireless OpenWRT Mesh Contest called “Wireless Battle Mesh” during 2 days (April 11-12th) with the goal of building 3 wireless mesh networks based on embedded hardware running OpenWRT and different concurrent mesh routing protocols.

The targeted architecture will be 3 networks of 25nodes + 1 wireless managment networks (10-20 nodes) to achieve realistic size of nodes number, data traffic, configuration problems. The architecture will be set-up indoor and outdoor around the building of the /tmp/lab.

OpenWRT will be the selected for the BoardSupportPackage running on the different hardware nodes and a core network configuration will be built on Linux servers with user-friendly features such as :
*VLANs
*Captive portal
*Authentication
*Admin portal

Concerning the mesh-protocols, selected targeted protocols are :

*OLSR : IP-based mesh routing platform (http://olsr.org and openWRT package available)

*BATMAN : Layer2-based mesh protocol (http://open-mesh.org) and available as a kernel module for Linux and packaged in OpenWRT

*BABEL : Layer-3 mesh protocol developed by University Paris 6, available for Linux and soon to be packaged for OpenWRT (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/)

Concerning the hardware node, we are looking for hardware sponsors that could enjoy this “real-case” contest by providing 50-100 nodes to the event. This sponsor will be actually displayed on the organization website as well as during the event. The feedbacks for the hardware manufacturers can be not only from the users but also from the network community running real-case test (academic- or community-wide).

The TMPLAB core team.

7 Replies to “First TMPLAB Wireless Battle Mesh – April 11-12th 2009 @ tmplab”

  1. Moshroum says:

    Interesting. There is a contest from someone who want to spit in the fire. Never heard that this is not a good idea? Some OLSR people hate the B.A.T.M.A.N. guys like arch enemies. The babel guy is also starting to fight against them. Lets hope that you will have somebody which removes the blood afterwards….

    But how should you be able to know the situation when you describe B.A.T.M.A.N. as a Layer 2 protocol. B.A.T.M.A.N. itself is an idea how to find routes inside a wifi mesh. The batmand (package name in debian/openwrt) is a implementation which does only route discovery and route configuration with gateway tunneling. This is thing is implemented in userspace with an optional linux kernelland module to speedup the gateway functionality. This thing works on the same layer as olsr does and was the first implementation of the B.A.T.M.A.N. algorithm. It can only route ip based stuff (as olsr) and does it only by manipulating the routing tables. Its kamikaze package is outdated… extreme outdated. SVN openwrt packages should be up to date.

    B.A.T.M.A.N. _advanced_ was the idea to encapsulate ethernet frames and send them through the network. So it more or less a virtual switch build on top of an adhoc wifi network (if you use adhoc wifi of course). It will route your complete ethernet traffic over it. So it is able to transport your old ipx based c&c network game and dhcp configuration over this virtual switch.
    There was a proof of concept implementation done in linux userspace which was to slow on embedded systems to transport high amount of traffic. This was fixed by doing everything in linux kernelland. There was no stable release until 25c3 (which was less then two month ago). The openwrt kamikaze packages are heavily outdated – svn openwrt packages seems quite fresh. But they dont provide support for packet aggregation.

  2. […] Concerning the hardware node, we are looking for hardware sponsors that could enjoy this “real-case” contest by providing 50-100 nodes……….. More after the jump. […]

  3. Anthony says:

    Hi guys,

    What kind of hardware do you need? Anything that can run OpenWRT? Can we lend you some nodes and get them back after the battle?

    Thanks,
    Anthony

  4. phil says:

    We would need anything that runs OpenWRT indeed, as you said 🙂
    For sure, if you lend us some nodes you’ll get them back after the battle.

  5. […] are pleased to announce that our friends at /tmp/lab (hackerspace paris) will be organizing a Spring Wireless OpenWRT Mesh Contest called Wireless […]

  6. […] April 2009: First TMPLAB Wireless Battle Mesh /tmp/lab (Information – […]

  7. dotforward23 says:

    Moshroum, hi!

    Actually the OLSR folks don’t hate BATMAN folks 🙂

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