On Jun 11, 2010, at 2:32 PM, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: > Hi, > > Many of us spent last week-end at the third edition of the Wireless > BattleMesh in Bracciano, north of Rome, experimenting with wireless mesh > routing technologies. Here's a quick summary of the events, from the > perspective of the Babel routing protocol. > > > 1. The main event > ***************** > > The main goal of the meeting was to evaluate the real-world behaviour of > a bunch of wireless mesh routing protocols. Five protocols were > evaluated: OLSR, Babel, and three variants of BATMAN. > > The protocol were tested in three static topologies: a broken network, > a network with massive packet loss, and a network with high but > reasonable packet loss. Elektra has written up a summary of the results > (thanks!) of which I've put a copy on > > http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/wbmv3-elektra.pdf > > In short: > > (1) when the network is broken, Babel is the first to collapse; > (2) Babel behaves well when the network is usable; Could you be a bit more specific with "usable"?? What does that mean regarding packetloss? The interesting problem with Wi-Fi networks is that we have usually way too much packet loss. (remember: that was also the main critique against the MPR approach)
> (3) Babel generates too many small packets on broken networks. > Which creates more collisions in the air I assume ;-) > I believe that (1) is normal: Babel reacts faster than the other > protocols to mobility, and therefore tends to be less stable than the > others in broken networks. > > Point (3) is due to the route request mechanism: a Babel node in > a broken network is trying too hard to discover new routes. I'm not > sure whether that can be fixed without losing Babel's fast reaction to > mobility. > > > 2. Helicopters with webcams and sharks with lasers > ************************************************** > yeah ;-) Wish I had been there.. > In addition to the main event, described above, there were a few > interesting side events. The Roman crowd (ninux.org) have been working > on running Linux on a model helicopter equipped with Wifi and a webcam; > the goal would have been to stream video from the over a Babel mesh. > Which got me excited like a child before Christmas. > > Unfortunately, they didn't have time to complete the experiment (due to > issues with ffmpeg, as far as I understand), which is a huge pity. > Let's hope we hear from the webcam-equipped helicopter soon. > > There were no sharks equipped with lasers, whether running Linux or > otherwise. > > > 3. Diversity-aware routing > ************************** > > Zoobab and myself have been trying to work on diversity-aware routing > protocols. There is now a branch of babeld (known as babelz) which > performs diversity-aware routing, and appears to work. However, due to > wine, beer, grappa and other factors outside of our control, we haven't > managed to obtain any useful measurements from babelz. > ;-) > Babelz should be made public as soon as I find some time to finish > debugging it. In the meantime, let me know if you want a copy. > > > 4. Babel for OpenBSD > ******************** > > Dermiste has finished the Babel port to OpenBSD, and we've been able to > do some debugging -- it appears to work now. This implies that Babel > should be easy to port to other Kame stacks (notably FreeBSD and Darwin). > > The code hasn't been merged into the trunk yet. > > > 5. Time-lapse video > ******************* > > Somebody (who?) has been experimenting with time-lapse video. The > results are quite amusing -- search Youtube for "BattleMeshV3". > > My only regret the time-lapse video has been made on DRM'd hardware > running proprietary software. (Folks, we need hackable digital cameras > -- CHDK is not enough.) > > > 6. Other stuff > ************** > > I've had a lot of extremely interesting discussions with a lot of > extremely interesting people. In no particular order, I've learnt a lot > about automatic tunnelling of IPv4 in v6, The Pirate Party, solar cells, > BMX, Liquid Democracy, MOSFETs, Ugo Foscolo, rural exodus in the Greek > islands, wireless networking in Catalogna and groundsheets. > > My liver has almost recovered. > ;-) Thanks for the write up... > > 7. Thanks > ********* > > Yes, thanks. > > > Juliusz > _______________________________________________ Babel-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/babel-users
