[Battlemesh] My thoughts to setup a citywide mesh network

Valent Turkovic valent at otvorenamreza.org
Mon Mar 14 20:52:45 CET 2016


On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Henning Rogge <hrogge at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 1:59 PM, Valent Turkovic
> <valent at otvorenamreza.org> wrote:
> >> 2) Is OLSR OpenWRT the right choice? A suggestion?
> >
> >
> > OLSR is ok for up to 200 nodes, but why not just use existing solution
> that
> > JustWorks(tm) - http://nodes.wlan-si.net
> > Try it out and you will be probably be amazed :)
> >
> > We use Babel and are probably biggest mesh network that work without
> issues
> > that others are having with using Batman and OLSR. Babel routing
> protocol is
> > only one that scales beyond 300 nodes and doesn't have lots of issues...
>
> That is an interesting "advertisement" without lots of facts to back
> it up... especially because OLSR mesh networks with 400-600 nodes have
> been around for a long time.
>
> I am also quite sure there are BATMAN mesh networks with hundreds of nodes.


This is not an "advertisement" but also I'm not main network developer of
Wlan Slovenia network, but I'm building community wifi networks for last 13
years. I joined Wlan Slovenia network and "forked" it in Croatia. Combined
we have some 450 nodes (over 100 in Croatia and rest in Slovenia) which all
form one network.

OLSR stopped working once we hid mark od 350 nodes, so we had to migrate to
Babel, from what I understand OLSR doesn't fragment routing packages so
nodes weren't getting all routing info so our network basically stopped
working until we migrated to Babel. If I'm totally wrong I hope that guys
from Wlan Slovenia will give a much more detailed info.

Also I know that Batman is not suitable for big networks, but not from my
own experience but from exerience from Munich Freifunk guys. I was in
Munich visiting them when they had 500 nodes, and then later when they also
hit 1000 nodes mark. They said that they have so much issues with Batman
and network being down much of the time that they work all the time on
keeping the network up and have no time on expanding the network...

Just jump in on their mailing list or IRC and ask them directly what issues
are they having, but from what I heard they were having major issues... but
maybe I misunderstood them, which is also a possibility.
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