On 10/07/2011 03:48 AM, Fred Baker wrote: > 4) The use of OLSR in mesh network scenarios > > Jim Gettys commented on the fact of OLSR use. The general sense of the room > was that OLSRv2 is interesting but out of scope for this discussion as mesh > networks are quite different from typical residential and SOHO networks. > Actually, I have no opinion of OLSR, Babel, Babelz or OSPF; it's not my area of expertise.
Babel/BabelZ is appearing in CeroWrt today as the people who are interested in such things are doing the work (we don't need a routing protocol in the simple single home router case), and it provided the functionality we needed. For those who want something else, quagga is in the CeroWrt build for your hacking pleasure. And I'm not advocating the homenet working group do anything unusual about routing at this date; as I said, it's not my area of expertise. Having said this, I do note the following technological trends: 1) As soon as we get real "plug and play" routers that don't need manual configuration that work, we'll see a lot more routers in a home environment. Other radio technologies (e.g. zigbee) may encourage this trend. It seemed like the working group agreed that getting to the point that just hooking things together would really "just worked" was a fundamental requirement (and I agree entirely with this sentiment, as it reflects reality of what already happens in the homes of hackers and non-hackers alike). 2) wireless is much cheaper to implement than wired networking, particularly in most houses where pulling cable is hard. I know this first hand, where I've pulled a lot of cat 6 and wish I could get it to places I don't have it. Unless power line networking really works, I believe that this trend isn't going to change. Is there any progress in this area? I've seen many promises, and few reliable working products. 3) As soon as you have two routers, you have at least two paths; the wired connection between them and the wireless. You may have 3 paths, if you have both 2.4 and 5ghz radios. Frequency diversity routing becomes immediately interesting, along with using your ethernet when it's available in preference to wireless. 4) an apartment building look like a mesh, and possibly with multiple backhauls possibly with multiple ISP's. One should at least think about what happens when you have "homes", in such a building, and make sure nothing breaks. Wireless is messy: it isn't limited to where a wire goes. Taking down an entire apartment building/blocks/city would not be fun. I know, I've been there (at least to the point of taking down buildings, and came within a week of a much larger scale disaster). If you believe 1 + 2 + 3 +4 (as I do), then if you look a few years out, you end up with something in the "home" that begins to resemble very strongly what the community mesh networking folks are doing at a higher scale geographically and in terms of # of nodes today, with many/most of the same concerns and solutions. Understanding the problems they've faced/are facing is therefore worth a bit of investment; Radio diversity is one of the concerns, and interference (of various sorts). Julius' talk about why frequency diversity is an issue is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VNzm0shSA8 While the issues outlined above are not where home networking is today, my gut feel is they will be in five years. If there is *anything* I can urge on the group, is to respect the scaling problems that can/will occur, and to internalise wireless !=wired: wireless goes where wireless goes and does not behave like ethernet. The group needs to ensure nothing "bad" happens when people start building systems in ways you don't expect, particularly in an apartment building. The challenge is balancing the reality of how wireless works, with "just works" automatic configuration, with "fail safe" behaviour. - Jim _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list homenet@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
