[Battlemesh] Proposal for battlemesh v10 "testbed"

[Linus Lüssing]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 12:42:09AM +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> > Simon mentioned that he wasn't really personally interested in
> > "battling" protocols so much (as in the first few battlemeshes),
> 
> This would be the kiss of death for Battlemesh.
> 
> Battlemesh is about experimentally comparing the performance of routing
> protocols.  If Battlemesh doesn't compare routing protocols, it becomes
> yet another community meet-up.  The technical people will no longer come,
> the community people, who come to battlemesh because it's a chance to meet
> the technical crowd, will go to places that are more interesting, and
> Battlemesh will wither away.

To add one more provocative point: The numbers from the BattleMesh
so far were never really helpful for the BattleMesh from the
batman-adv developer side. Maybe the ones from the BattleMesh with
OLSRv2 and its throughput metric were, for the first time -
incredible work from Henning! (and resulted in batman-adv
implementing throughput metric in BATMAN V, too (*) - I know from a talk
at WBMv4 six years ago, that BABEL is very flexible regarding metrics and
that it is sooo easy to change - so I'm wondering, why was there no throughput
metric for BABEL at the last BattleMesh, or did I just miss that?)

The numbers which were far more helpful for me and lead me to some humble
contributions to batman-adv were from actual, real world community
setups. Some measurement, statistics and graphs helped to set the
right priorities to scale batman-adv to not just seventy - that's
where we hit our first scalability bottleneck with batman-adv - to
over a thousand nodes in various setups these days.


So, all these years, was the BattleMesh a waste of time for the BATMAN
developers? Will they disappear from the WBM? No, far from it! It
has always provided us with:

1) Inspiration: Talking with great people lead to great, new ideas.
2) Collaboration: batman-adv devs live in various
   places around the world, so WBM is always our annual
   meetup, to talk and work on things which are easier
   in person than over chat, email or phone. (And sorry for others
   that batman-adv devs then here and then seclude themselves a bit :(.
   But we usually arrive with a pile of topics regarding batman-adv
   which we want to discuss and work on during this short week)
3) Motivation: Talking with awesome people, especially the ones
   doing a lot of crazy stuff in their community setups and
   sharing experiences, needs and anecdotes, is always motivating
   (at least for me)


Juliusz, I agree that trying to gather conclusive numbers is
something we should strive for on the long run. There are enough
wrong claims and statements in politics, economics or marketing
surrounding us already :( (and choosing a hip protocol name and
marketing it with T-shirts etc. probably adds to that at WBM,
too, unfortunately, ... but so did generelized claims like
"layer 2" does not scale or "link-state" does not scale).

Just saying, I think mesh protocols are still at a stage too early
to actually be comparable with each other. Even after ten years of
WBM we are still at the beginning of the possibilities of mesh
networks. The only thing we can and I think should do, is trying
to create a welcome, inspiring and motivating environment to
experiment with and discover those possibilities and exchange our
findings.

It does not matter who is quickest at crawling for
20m if we haven't even discovered running on two legs yet
and if there is a whole marathon still ahead of us.

Regards, Linus


(*): Or maybe Antonio actually started working on a throughput
metric in BATMAN V before that BattleMesh in Slovenia? Can't quite
remember.