Wireless mesh networking

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Rui Paulo wrote:
 > Hi,
 > If anyone is interested in testing out wireless mesh networking under
 > FreeBSD, the project has now reached a point where you can transfer
 > packets between mesh nodes.

Always a good point to celebrate :)

 > I try to keep the branch in sync with head (sometimes more than)
 > weekly. The branch is located at the FreeBSD svn repo and everyone can
 > fetch it:
 > 
 > $ svn co http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/projects/mesh11s/

Not that I could run it now or even soon, but I'm interested in having a 
look at the code, mostly to try figuring out the scope of what layers 
this is working at, and noting that this is my first ever attempted use 
of svn (and if it matters, on a 5.5-S box):

sola% mkdir 802.11s
sola% cd 802.11s/
sola% svn co http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/projects/mesh11s/
svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/viewvc/base/projects/mesh11s'
svn: PROPFIND of '/viewvc/base/projects/mesh11s': 301 Moved (http://svn.freebsd.org)

Where to from here?  Might there be an old-fashioned tarball?

 > To actually try out mesh networking you need ath(4) because ral(4) has
 > problems right now.
 > 
 > After building and installing a new world and kernel, you need to do this:
 > # ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev ath0 wlanmode mesh channel 1 meshid mymesh
 > # ifconfig wlan0 inet w.x.y.z/q up
 > 
 > Channel discovery for mesh networks is not yet implemented, hence you
 > need to manually specify the channel on which the mesh is running (all
 > nodes must be on the same channel and same meshid, just like regular
 > AP operation).

Not more like regular ad-hoc operation?

Pardon my ignorance.  I've followed your later wikipedia links and many 
others from there, but still haven't got much of an overview.  I'm a 
little familiar with how OLSR works, and got some meaty clues reading 
about the OLPC XO-1 use of their subset of 11s, but that's it so far.

cheers, Ian

 > If you can't ping other mesh node, try putting one ath(4) interface in
 > promisc mode (I'm still investigating this problem).
 > 
 > This project is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation
 > (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/).
 > 
 > Thanks,
 > -- 
 > Rui Paulo