Wireless Battle Mesh

From Tmplab
Revision as of 09:16, 6 April 2009 by Florian (talk | contribs)

Call for Participants

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 management network (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 :

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.

Agenda

  • Friday, April 10th, 8 pm : welcoming of the first people coming and flashing of the node and configuration of the nodes
  • Sat, April 11th :
    • Morning : setting up the nodes on-site and validation of the different subnets
    • Afternoon : first series of tests and measurements with fixed nodes
  • Sun 12th :
    • Morning : second series of tests and measurement with fixed and mobile nodes (laptops)
    • Afternoon : Optimization of the protocols and Conclusion

Evaluation criterion

We will evaluate the routing protocols using the following criterions :

  • time to setup a node
  • CPU activity
  • network activity
  • convergence time
  • scalability
  • mobile devices handling

Hardware platforms

We managed to get sponsoring for such hardware :

  • Linksys WRT54G/GS
  • Asus WL500G Deluxe/Premium
  • Fon Fonera

For each protocol 25 nodes will be setup, with the following quantities :

  • FON : 25 nodes
  • HSB : 32 nodes
  • Wireless-fr : 6 nodes
  • Tmplab : 15 nodes
  • BATMAN : 10 nodes
  • Thus0 : 5 nodes

Total : 93 nodes. In case of problems, spare nodes are highly wanted.

Hardware identification

For each and every single node in the network, please prepare stickers containing the following informations :

  • routing protocol in use
  • MAC address of the Wi-Fi interface
  • IP address in the management network
  • Owner
  • hostname (e.g: node 1)

Node setup

Each and every single node consists of the following physical parts :

  • A device (Linksys, Fon ...)
  • Antennas (no external one except one deciced)
  • Power supply unit
  • (Battery)

Software platform

The different software versions in use during the Wireless Battle Mesh are :

  • babel-0.93, there's also a page about Babel
  • olsrd-0.5.6-r4
  • batman-adv-r1220

OpenWrt should be Kamikaze 8.09. Broadcom-based hardware should be using the brcm-2.4 image while Atheros-based hardware should be using the atheros target. If you need help flashing your devices do not hesitate to poke Florian and Nico about this.

Software configuration

Every node should be configured with the following settings :

  • hostname: node<N>-<routing protocol> (where N can be found using the plan/map and the routing protocol is babel, olsr or batman)
  • user: root
  • password: wbm2009

We would like to be able to monitor the activity of every node, therefore an aditional SNMP configuration should be done with the following settings :

  • version: 2
  • community: wbm2009
  • permissions: ro
  • allow graph disk/flash activity (e.g: disk /)

Package list and repositories

A mirror of the OpenWrt kamikaze 8.09 package repository will be available during the WBM2009. Additionnal packages that we recommend to install are :

  • ntpclient (or busybox's rdate)
  • wprobe
  • snmpd

Network topology

To be defined.