[Battlemesh] Collaborate on TDMA development

Gui Iribarren gui at altermundi.net
Mon Oct 22 22:08:42 CEST 2012


Hello people,
in several chats with NicoEchaniz, we end up concluding it would be
wonderful to have a libre TDMA implementation for mac80211, so that
ath9k and other current drivers can partially overcome the awful
performance issues of a shared medium.

AirOS does a wonderful job when handling several hidden stations, but
it's unfortunately a propietary software solution. Flashing OpenWRT
opens the box of possibilities in terms of software but severely
impacts radio performance.

We think solving this would greatly benefit the wireless community
networks worldwide, and several attempts / achievements have been made
in the past. Sadly, the solutions are now outdated, or were absorbed
by private companies at some point in the development cycle.
A key problem in the past was the lack of a uniform stack like
mac80211 provides, so the implementations were tied to one particular
driver (madwifi for example) and had to be reinvented / ported when
that driver was abandoned / deprecated.

So, what do you think about coding a TDMA solution for mac80211 stack?
Are there any current projects that are already on this track, that we
haven't come accross?
If a team is formed, we could propose the idea for an NLNET /
shuttleworth / etc grant.

Background / Past efforts linkdump:

projects: jazzymac, srawan, JaldiMAC, wildmac, fractel, 2P. LiT,
WiLDnet,karlNet TurboCell, wiccp, frottle, nstreme, oswave

http://patraswireless.net/software.html
http://wafreenet.org/Frottle
http://www.netequalizer.com/Hidden_Node_White_Paper.php
https://github.com/shaddi/jaldimac
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/node/128 (wildnet)
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/wireless

frottle ipkg (old)?
http://www.ipkg.be/repositories/26

a possible design on frottle for meshes
http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/wiki/?MWRPAdhocFrottleDev

tdma on freebsd by sam leffler

AirJaldi
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/blog/
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/

nice summary of experiences
http://wiki.airjaldi.org/tiki-index.php

AirJaldi Bandwidth Maximizer (BwM)
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/node/264
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/node/265



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