[Battlemesh] My thoughts to setup a citywide mesh network

[Linus Lüssing]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 02:20:04PM -0700, Mitar wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Ah, the specific here is that we have a highly connected nodes, VPN
> servers, and this became issue for OLSR. It is not the size of the
> network, but the type of its topology.
> 
> So I would not claim that we are biggest mesh network that work without
> issues, but that each network has its specifics and they have to deal
> with them.
> 
> Also, it is unclear what "mesh" really means. We are using VPN
> connections, is this still a mesh? It is from the topology perspective,
> but we do not have as many WiFi links. On the other hand, guifi.net has
> thousands of nodes and links between them, but they use a different stack.
> 
> So, I am glad Valent that you love the work we are doing in wlan
> slovenija, but I would not really claim that one approach is better than
> another. I think what we all learn as a global community is that you
> always have to adapt approaches to local circumstances, and also local
> knowledge and opportunities. So it is really hard to compare and say one
> is better than another.

Amen.

Indeed, even for all these Gluon / batman-adv based meshes for
Freifunk communities here in Germany, it never worked for 1000 nodes
out-of-the-box. Several limits were hit and local issues occured which
could be tackled. The solutions were made available to other communities
in an easy-to-use fashion through OpenWRT packages within the Gluon mesh
firmware framework.

And so I am positive that 1000 nodes is still far from being the end
for batman-adv. The next scalabilty enhancements are already on their
way, both within batman-adv and Gluon.

Regards, Linus


PS: Also comparing the Freifunk Munich (Gluon based) setup with
Wireless Slovenia does not quite work, I think, because it seems
there are differing priorities. If seamless roaming support for external,
wireless, non-meshing devices weren't such a high priority for many
Freifunk communities, scaling would have been easier, for instance.

The cool thing is, that through these differing priorities we get
advances and experience in several directions which we can then
exchange and all learn from at the next community gatherings and
Battlemeshes :).