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

By: dotforward23

dotforward23 — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:16:20 +0000

Moshroum, hi!

Actually the OLSR folks don’t hate BATMAN folks

By: HSB: Welcome to Hacker Space Brussels (HSB)

HSB: Welcome to Hacker Space Brussels (HSB) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:07:17 +0000

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

By: HSB: Wireless Battle Mesh (Paris, 11-12 April)

HSB: Wireless Battle Mesh (Paris, 11-12 April) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:54:11 +0000

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

By: phil

phil — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:04:16 +0000

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.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:12:45 +0000

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

By: | First TMPLAB WirelessBattle Mesh - April 11-12th 2009 @ tmplab

| First TMPLAB WirelessBattle Mesh - April 11-12th 2009 @ tmplab — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:46:24 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Moshroum

Moshroum — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:35:40 +0000

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 Its kamikaze package is outdated… extreme outdated.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.