Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/21/2010 11:46 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: ..From Wili Mesh Website... Look at the Supported Platform.. these are pretty much most of the SBC Mfg. that make a multi radio board for use in outdoor AP. At first Wili looked good. But I read some of its forum postings and learned about its limits. Wili's mesh seems to use the old Trango-era definition -- a lame network that works one hop, maybe two, from an injection point, aimed at building and campus coverage, and limited city use. It is not what I call a mesh, meaning a network with an arbitrary mesh (any node can link to any other) topology. OSPF, as an example, supports a mesh topology, but only in IP. Wiliboxes have one uplink and one downlink, period. Not even rings. HWMPplus still looks better, on paper/pixels, but RouterOS is remarkably closed for Linux. OpenWRT and OLSR or BATMAN on a Routerboard or Ubiquiti CPU platform may be ideal, but I need to learn more about OLSR and BATMAN in practice. BATMAN seems to be a distance-vector algorithm, like, uh, DECNET 3 and 4 and IGRP, while OLSR is link state, like OSPF. I am partial to link state. The BATMAN guys note that it doesn't scale well, especially 100 nodes, but I'm not looking to have that many in a domain. Distance vectors are fast to learn new routes but have problems with dropped routes. BTW today's discussion (different thread, I know) points out how this class of equipment really does mostly do its smarts using IP-layer protocols. Most of the layer 2 stuff is bridging, an obsolete concept from the 1990s. I'd love to see layer 2 switching, as in MEF Carrier Ethernet. That's based on tags, not MAC addresses, and has CIR/EIR per flow. But then I may have something better in the works so this is all interim. Regards. *SUPPORTED HARDWARE* *Supported CPU architectures:* Intel IA32 Intel XScale MIPS ARM-9 *Supported 802.11 radio modules:* Based on Atheros chipsets: AR5004 AR5006 AR2313 AR2316 AR5213 From different vendors: Ubiquity Networks SENAO Z-COM WISTRON and other *Supported platforms* (contact sa...@wilibox.com mailto:sa...@wilibox.com for details) ADI Engineering Pronghorn PC Engines WRAP.2C Gateworks Avila Wistron RDAT81 LanReady AP1000 LanReady FN522 LanReady WDR800 Zinwell ZW4400 Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/21/2010 9:08 AM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/21/2010 01:01 AM, you wrote: MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. Have you looked at batman-adv on OpenWRT? http://www.open-mesh.net/wiki/batman-adv It looks interesting, at a high level. But is OpenWRT up for use on the multi-radio outdoor nodes? The one such vendor that I am aware of is UBNT. Since we our contemplating our own long-term solution, I'm looking for something that works without a whole lot of work out of the box. Configuration, sure; coding, no. So how hard is it to run BaTMAN-adv on a RouterStation? I suppose with three cPCI radio slots on the board and Ethernet that could go to an external radio, a decent-sized node, even sectorized, could be built out of this class of gear, given some nice packaging. -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
OpenWRT and OLSR or BATMAN on a Routerboard or Ubiquiti CPU platform may be ideal, but I need to learn more about OLSR and BATMAN in practice. BATMAN seems to be a distance-vector algorithm, like, uh, DECNET 3 and 4 and IGRP, while OLSR is link state, like OSPF. I am partial to link state. The BATMAN guys note that it doesn't scale well, especially 100 nodes, but I'm not looking to have that many in a domain. Distance vectors are fast to learn new routes but have problems with dropped routes. Although TRILL is being developed on networks with fiber-rich diets, it might be good to a wireless mesh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_%28computing%29 In essence, Layer 2 link-state that is good for meshes. The question if link-state or distance-vector is more appropriate to a wireless mesh is something yet to be defined, but you said you are partial to link-state, so TRILL will probably thrill you. Rubens WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/25/2010 10:45 PM, Rubens Kuhl wrote: OpenWRT and OLSR or BATMAN on a Routerboard or Ubiquiti CPU platform may be ideal, but I need to learn more about OLSR and BATMAN in practice. BATMAN seems to be a distance-vector algorithm, like, uh, DECNET 3 and 4 and IGRP, while OLSR is link state, like OSPF. I am partial to link state. The BATMAN guys note that it doesn't scale well, especially 100 nodes, but I'm not looking to have that many in a domain. Distance vectors are fast to learn new routes but have problems with dropped routes. Although TRILL is being developed on networks with fiber-rich diets, it might be good to a wireless mesh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_%28computing%29 In essence, Layer 2 link-state that is good for meshes. The question if link-state or distance-vector is more appropriate to a wireless mesh is something yet to be defined, but you said you are partial to link-state, so TRILL will probably thrill you. Yes, TRILL looks like a good idea. And since Radia Perlman wrote the RFC, I trust that it is of unusually high quality for an RFC. ;-) However, the only daemon I'm aware of is for OpenSolaris (Radia's at Sun), not a WRT. It sure would be nice if either of the dueling WRT teams implemented it. And btw I stand corrected on OLSR -- it's IP only -- BATMAN-adv is Layer 2. -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/21/2010 01:01 AM, you wrote: MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. Have you looked at batman-adv on OpenWRT? http://www.open-mesh.net/wiki/batman-adv It looks interesting, at a high level. But is OpenWRT up for use on the multi-radio outdoor nodes? The one such vendor that I am aware of is UBNT. Since we our contemplating our own long-term solution, I'm looking for something that works without a whole lot of work out of the box. Configuration, sure; coding, no. So how hard is it to run BaTMAN-adv on a RouterStation? I suppose with three cPCI radio slots on the board and Ethernet that could go to an external radio, a decent-sized node, even sectorized, could be built out of this class of gear, given some nice packaging. -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
..From Wili Mesh Website... Look at the Supported Platform.. these are pretty much most of the SBC Mfg. that make a multi radio board for use in outdoor AP. Regards. *SUPPORTED HARDWARE* *Supported CPU architectures:* Intel IA32 Intel XScale MIPS ARM-9 *Supported 802.11 radio modules:* Based on Atheros chipsets: AR5004 AR5006 AR2313 AR2316 AR5213 From different vendors: Ubiquity Networks SENAO Z-COM WISTRON and other *Supported platforms* (contact sa...@wilibox.com mailto:sa...@wilibox.com for details) ADI Engineering Pronghorn PC Engines WRAP.2C Gateworks Avila Wistron RDAT81 LanReady AP1000 LanReady FN522 LanReady WDR800 Zinwell ZW4400 Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/21/2010 9:08 AM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/21/2010 01:01 AM, you wrote: MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. Have you looked at batman-adv on OpenWRT? http://www.open-mesh.net/wiki/batman-adv It looks interesting, at a high level. But is OpenWRT up for use on the multi-radio outdoor nodes? The one such vendor that I am aware of is UBNT. Since we our contemplating our own long-term solution, I'm looking for something that works without a whole lot of work out of the box. Configuration, sure; coding, no. So how hard is it to run BaTMAN-adv on a RouterStation? I suppose with three cPCI radio slots on the board and Ethernet that could go to an external radio, a decent-sized node, even sectorized, could be built out of this class of gear, given some nice packaging. -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/20/2010 12:32 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :) Thanks. :-) Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... It is different... in particular, the WISP community knocks a few zeroes off of the allowable costs. I like that... you can put up a node for what your basic Bell would pay for a jumper cable or the like. This is the only way to make service affordable in small clusters, like 50/node. The FCC-blessed approach, in contrast, is to have a rural ILEC spend $20k+ per subscriber to pull glass or hybrid fiber-copper to the neighborhood, and charge the rest of the country for it via the USF. In this case we're in the outskirts of an ATT exchange, so there's no USF for them, and thus no service beyond dial tone. In the wireline world, we look at Vyatta as this super-low-cost alternative to that company that rhymes with Crisco. Here, Vyatta is that high-end alternative to a Latvian import. Those other guys, the ones that basically control the IETF, don't play. I like that too... ... BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the mesh networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making routing decision.. but you are not going to find OSLR in commercial radios not at the moment... That's one reason why MicroTik's HWMPplus looked attractive. It is designed for wireless, and claims to take link conditions into account. It looks like a direct competitor for OSLR. If you look at all of the folks who are delivering successful mesh products, you will find them to be using 'proprietary' developed mechanisms to deal with the issues..e.g. Ruckus Wireless uses it's special antennas and a 'zone controller' to keep the Mesh radios in tip top shape, by dynamically adjusting all of the parameters on a real time basis.. As far as finding a multi-radio board... there are a few available best to see the link to Wili Box site that I had sent in an earlier email... they list out a number of mfg. for both the sbc's and the radios.. the question you will have to figure out is..on what part of the 'network design' ... 'ip routing ?' you will be willing to make a compromise on...and you still have not addressed the question of Antennas:) after using a good working 802.11n radios with MiMo Antennas... it is rather hard to go back to regular stuff... I'm definitely interested in MIMO. LTE, which is starting to be rolled out in the CMRS world and, separately, in the public safety radio world, includes MIMO, both beamforming for range and parallel transmission for close-in speed. If I could find a pole-top system (mesh node) that did dynamic MIMO instead of using sectorized antennas, it'd be a serious win. Also, 4x4 MIMO is probably coming out soon, and at 5.8 GHz a proper 4x4 antenna is still pretty small, and has of course a lot more gain (and interference notching) than 2x2. WiMAX can have MIMO too (it's an option), but I haven't seen it in the unlicensed low-cost world. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom On 6/19/2010 8:50 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: This is one of the problems with any kind of best efforts routing or bridging. Loss does accumulate. Of course it's the single-frequency meshes where loss goes totally gaga. One of the advantages of Carrier Ethernet with Q-in-Q is that CIRs can be assigned to different points along the way, with reserved capacity, so the near-in nodes don't hog everything. I don't think HWMPplus does full CE, but it may have some tools to play with. If anybody can suggest a better software load for a field-mountable multi-radio processor, notably one that does MEF CE, I'm not wedded to MicroTik. This is interim, after all; we hope to have our own code at some point. On the Layer 2 v 3 thing, the distinction is artificial. Off the shelf, LAN-oriented L2 switching does dumb bridging, based on an assumption that it's all on-site with plenty of zero-cost orange hose bandwidth to play with. So STP just avoids loops. IP
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
I'd love to get Faisal and Fred in a room together and just be a fly on the wall ... Friendly Regards, Mike Mike Gilchrist Disruptive Technologist Advanced Wireless Express WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
I am blushing... I cannot even hold a candle to Fred For those of you who do not know Fredhe is the 'Jack Ungar' of the wireline world.. He not only know the Technical Stuff (very formally practical implementations) but is also a respected expert in Regulatory Affairs in the CLEC world. I think it is simply awesome for Fred to join the WISPA list and participate. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom On 6/20/2010 12:25 PM, Mike wrote: I'd love to get Faisal and Fred in a room together and just be a fly on the wall ... Friendly Regards, Mike Mike Gilchrist Disruptive Technologist Advanced Wireless Express WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Fred, all these years I've known you, I had no idea you had wireless knowledge like this. Usually those wireline guys are pretty focused in their knowledge. :-p - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com On 6/20/2010 11:19 AM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/20/2010 12:32 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :) Thanks. :-) Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... It is different... in particular, the WISP community knocks a few zeroes off of the allowable costs. I like that... you can put up a node for what your basic Bell would pay for a jumper cable or the like. This is the only way to make service affordable in small clusters, like50/node. The FCC-blessed approach, in contrast, is to have a rural ILEC spend $20k+ per subscriber to pull glass or hybrid fiber-copper to the neighborhood, and charge the rest of the country for it via the USF. In this case we're in the outskirts of an ATT exchange, so there's no USF for them, and thus no service beyond dial tone. In the wireline world, we look at Vyatta as this super-low-cost alternative to that company that rhymes with Crisco. Here, Vyatta is that high-end alternative to a Latvian import. Those other guys, the ones that basically control the IETF, don't play. I like that too... ... BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the mesh networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making routing decision.. but you are not going to find OSLR in commercial radios not at the moment... That's one reason why MicroTik's HWMPplus looked attractive. It is designed for wireless, and claims to take link conditions into account. It looks like a direct competitor for OSLR. If you look at all of the folks who are delivering successful mesh products, you will find them to be using 'proprietary' developed mechanisms to deal with the issues..e.g. Ruckus Wireless uses it's special antennas and a 'zone controller' to keep the Mesh radios in tip top shape, by dynamically adjusting all of the parameters on a real time basis.. As far as finding a multi-radio board... there are a few available best to see the link to Wili Box site that I had sent in an earlier email... they list out a number of mfg. for both the sbc's and the radios.. the question you will have to figure out is..on what part of the 'network design' ... 'ip routing ?' you will be willing to make a compromise on...and you still have not addressed the question of Antennas:) after using a good working 802.11n radios with MiMo Antennas... it is rather hard to go back to regular stuff... I'm definitely interested in MIMO. LTE, which is starting to be rolled out in the CMRS world and, separately, in the public safety radio world, includes MIMO, both beamforming for range and parallel transmission for close-in speed. If I could find a pole-top system (mesh node) that did dynamic MIMO instead of using sectorized antennas, it'd be a serious win. Also, 4x4 MIMO is probably coming out soon, and at 5.8 GHz a proper 4x4 antenna is still pretty small, and has of course a lot more gain (and interference notching) than 2x2. WiMAX can have MIMO too (it's an option), but I haven't seen it in the unlicensed low-cost world. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom On 6/19/2010 8:50 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: This is one of the problems with any kind of best efforts routing or bridging. Loss does accumulate. Of course it's the single-frequency meshes where loss goes totally gaga. One of the advantages of Carrier Ethernet with Q-in-Q is that CIRs can be assigned to different points along the way, with reserved capacity, so the near-in nodes don't hog everything. I don't think HWMPplus does full CE, but it may have some tools to play with. If anybody can suggest a better software load for a field-mountable multi-radio processor, notably one that does MEF
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/20/2010 01:58 PM, Mike Hammett wrote: Fred, all these years I've known you, I had no idea you had wireless knowledge like this. Usually those wireline guys are pretty focused in their knowledge. :-p I'm terribly unfocused. Well, I started on the radio side... got my first ham ticket in the sixties, when I was 11. I got my First Phone ticket while in high school and was chief engineer of my college radio station, and got them their Class D FM license. (Much more fun than classwork.) I did some work for Frontline Wireless a couple of years ago, albeit on the backhaul planning, and have some connections now to the public safety radio community, where 700 MHz LTE is about to take off. I also did some work supporting bidders in recent spectrum auctions... mostly involving GIS analysis and license valuation. The FCC has made wireline really difficult lately, so a lot of the competitive action is on the wireless side, even if only for survival. But it's also the fun side of the business, relatively speaking; there's less fighting Ma Bell when you don't need their wires. Urban and enterprise markets still need wireline (glass, coax, or copper). Wireless is underutilized in rural areas. USF and large-area licensing policies have distorted the market. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com On 6/20/2010 11:19 AM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/20/2010 12:32 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :) Thanks. :-) Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... It is different... in particular, the WISP community knocks a few zeroes off of the allowable costs. I like that... you can put up a node for what your basic Bell would pay for a jumper cable or the like. This is the only way to make service affordable in small clusters, like50/node. The FCC-blessed approach, in contrast, is to have a rural ILEC spend $20k+ per subscriber to pull glass or hybrid fiber-copper to the neighborhood, and charge the rest of the country for it via the USF. In this case we're in the outskirts of an ATT exchange, so there's no USF for them, and thus no service beyond dial tone. In the wireline world, we look at Vyatta as this super-low-cost alternative to that company that rhymes with Crisco. Here, Vyatta is that high-end alternative to a Latvian import. Those other guys, the ones that basically control the IETF, don't play. I like that too... ... BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the mesh networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making routing decision.. but you are not going to find OSLR in commercial radios not at the moment... That's one reason why MicroTik's HWMPplus looked attractive. It is designed for wireless, and claims to take link conditions into account. It looks like a direct competitor for OSLR. If you look at all of the folks who are delivering successful mesh products, you will find them to be using 'proprietary' developed mechanisms to deal with the issues..e.g. Ruckus Wireless uses it's special antennas and a 'zone controller' to keep the Mesh radios in tip top shape, by dynamically adjusting all of the parameters on a real time basis.. As far as finding a multi-radio board... there are a few available best to see the link to Wili Box site that I had sent in an earlier email... they list out a number of mfg. for both the sbc's and the radios.. the question you will have to figure out is..on what part of the 'network design' ... 'ip routing ?' you will be willing to make a compromise on...and you still have not addressed the question of Antennas:) after using a good working 802.11n radios with MiMo Antennas... it is rather hard to go back to regular stuff... I'm definitely interested in MIMO. LTE, which is starting to be rolled out in the CMRS world and, separately, in the public safety radio world, includes
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Inline On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Fred Goldstein fgoldst...@ionary.com wrote: At 6/20/2010 12:32 AM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :) Thanks. :-) Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... It is different... in particular, the WISP community knocks a few zeroes off of the allowable costs. I like that... you can put up a node for what your basic Bell would pay for a jumper cable or the like. This is the only way to make service affordable in small clusters, like 50/node. The FCC-blessed approach, in contrast, is to have a rural ILEC spend $20k+ per subscriber to pull glass or hybrid fiber-copper to the neighborhood, and charge the rest of the country for it via the USF. In this case we're in the outskirts of an ATT exchange, so there's no USF for them, and thus no service beyond dial tone. In the wireline world, we look at Vyatta as this super-low-cost alternative to that company that rhymes with Crisco. Here, Vyatta is that high-end alternative to a Latvian import. Those other guys, the ones that basically control the IETF, don't play. I like that too... My opinion is that the major work that is done on routing / network hardware by the companies with deep pockets is also done for companies with deep pockets. So, what you get is stuff designed to solve national problems, not small town needs Internet, and then, if needed, is just scaled down--with varying degrees of success. It's not just a matter of wireless running 10 years behind wireline--wireless really doesn't have anyone with deep pockets addressing these sorts of issues. Large-scale mesh from hard-core networking companies doesn't exist: the major service providers that do wireless pretty much all universally backhaul over wireline and avoid these issues. Unless the trajectory changes, I'd say that these issues aren't on a path to ever being solved, let alone inside of 10 years ;). So, it's probably a matter of roll your own or push back on the wireless vendors (Ubiquiti, Mikrotek), although I'm sure that they run on ridiculously thin margins and would need enough of a coalition to convince them that they could see any ROI by bringing this to maturity; it's also complicated by the fact that a lot of the vendors core expertise is RF, not IP. For what it's worth Fred, I somewhat disagreed with your assertion of IP is just another layer two protocol that made in a previous post. In the end, the power of IP is in its hierarchical nature which lets you summarize, which is critical to the amount of processing that it takes to process network decisions on a network of non-trivial size. That said, as long as you route, not bridge customers onto your mesh network, then the mesh network itself will remain small enough that layer two is perfectly reasonable. If you do HMWPplus, then I'd assume that you'd at some point need to scale by splitting mesh into multiple meshes; OLSRD is probably going to handle a large number of nodes more gracefully. However, as has been pointed out, having link-quality information as part of the routing decision is critical and, in the end, it is a lot more elegant to put that on layer two than on layer 3 like OLSRD does. You nailed a fundamental problem which is the lack of any sort of carrier / metro Ethernet style setup. For most traditional wireline vendors in this space, there are two basic components to making this work--classes of services / QOS (router side) and then the provisioning system which actually knows what's provisioned and what the remaining capacity on various spans is. The missing piece in this puzzle for wireless is the provisioning system, although the algorithms for doing route/bandwidth capacity calculations in a many-to-many mesh architecture are non-trivial to develop, to say the least. If you limited yourself to a ring-architecture, it would be much more doable. ... BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the mesh networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/20/2010 04:10 PM, Clint Ricker wrote: Inline ... My opinion is that the major work that is done on routing / network hardware by the companies with deep pockets is also done for companies with deep pockets. So, what you get is stuff designed to solve national problems, not small town needs Internet, and then, if needed, is just scaled down--with varying degrees of success. You're giving them too much credit. The IETF/Cisco world is going down ratholes, spinning wheels, getting nowhere. LISP? Gimme a break... it didn't even get the IETF blessing but Cisco's pushing it. IP is dead and they just don't know it. It still carries traffic, of course, but the zombie's corpse is starting to smell. And you're absolutely right that the big players don't care about little guys like WISPs. But you guys don't buy CSRs and 7600s. It's not just a matter of wireless running 10 years behind wireline--wireless really doesn't have anyone with deep pockets addressing these sorts of issues. Large-scale mesh from hard-core networking companies doesn't exist: the major service providers that do wireless pretty much all universally backhaul over wireline and avoid these issues. Right. They service the large, easy, well-heeled markets. They leave the tough, but smaller-volume, jobs to others. Unless the trajectory changes, I'd say that these issues aren't on a path to ever being solved, let alone inside of 10 years ;). So, it's probably a matter of roll your own or push back on the wireless vendors (Ubiquiti, Mikrotek), although I'm sure that they run on ridiculously thin margins and would need enough of a coalition to convince them that they could see any ROI by bringing this to maturity; it's also complicated by the fact that a lot of the vendors core expertise is RF, not IP. To be sure, one of the advantages of the MT Routerboards is that they'll run third-party code. And Vyatta, etc., but not the big guys. There is some startup activity I'm involved in that may address some of these issues. Hence sticking to layer 2 for now, since IP is part of the problem, not the solution. For what it's worth Fred, I somewhat disagreed with your assertion of IP is just another layer two protocol that made in a previous post. In the end, the power of IP is in its hierarchical nature which lets you summarize, which is critical to the amount of processing that it takes to process network decisions on a network of non-trivial size. IP is a big bucket of fail, which we are so used to using that we don't even look. Think naked emperor. It doesn't summarize well. This is one of the things that I did in RSPF, btw -- it did level 1 routing, meaning SPF routing within the subnet, which became in RSPF a node group since subnet implied the IETF norms. Not my idea, btw -- I just adapted it from DECnet! And RSPF addressed nodes, not interfaces. Boy did that get the IP Fundamentalists upset. They worship IP's bugs without knowing why they're there. Yes, I do know the origin of interface addressing, and why the IP address is inside FTP. My article Moving Beyond TCP/IP (see my web site or the Pouzin Society's) explains it. Sort of like Google's spec for VP8, which in parts just gives reference Unix code, which has known old bugs that were in VP3. That said, as long as you route, not bridge customers onto your mesh network, then the mesh network itself will remain small enough that layer two is perfectly reasonable. If you do HMWPplus, then I'd assume that you'd at some point need to scale by splitting mesh into multiple meshes; OLSRD is probably going to handle a large number of nodes more gracefully. However, as has been pointed out, having link-quality information as part of the routing decision is critical and, in the end, it is a lot more elegant to put that on layer two than on layer 3 like OLSRD does. The idea here is that the local mesh (a rural county-scale service area) will be one domain; other areas will be separate meshes, with separate injection points. So it's dozens, but not hundreds, of nodes. And thus it will look fully connected at the IP layer, which IP wants, for the IP traffic. You nailed a fundamental problem which is the lack of any sort of carrier / metro Ethernet style setup. For most traditional wireline vendors in this space, there are two basic components to making this work--classes of services / QOS (router side) and then the provisioning system which actually knows what's provisioned and what the remaining capacity on various spans is. The missing piece in this puzzle for wireless is the provisioning system, although the algorithms for doing route/bandwidth capacity calculations in a many-to-many mesh architecture are non-trivial to develop, to say the least. If you limited yourself to a ring-architecture, it would be much more doable. Well, rings per se are not flexible enough; a more complex topology (ring plus extra links) is more resilient. But it
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. Have you looked at batman-adv on OpenWRT? http://www.open-mesh.net/wiki/batman-adv WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Thanks. Just a few more questions please. 1. If you use self-configuring gear doesn't that mean at least as far as the backhaul it's all on the same frequency? Wouldn't a system where you manually configure the backhaul legs to use separate frequencies reduce self-interference and allow avoidance of existing noise sources? 2. To have the system be self-healing as far as not having any customers lose connectivity due to a site failure mean that each customer would need to be able to hear more than one site. So the site density would have to be very high, which again would lead to self-interference, especially if the answer to question #1 above is that the mesh (backhaul) part of the network is all on the same frequency? 3. Don't these mesh networks fall into two categories - 1 free hobbyist best-effort networks using low end gear and modest performance and 2 commercial/industrial/public service/military networks using more powerful and expensive gear (with lower site density and probably even GPS sync) yielding much higher performance. Thanks! Greg On Jun 18, 2010, at 10:00 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: On Jun 18, 2010, at 7:21 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. Yes, note two things please: 1) you can of course also have a mesh approach with point2multipoint (and even in infrastructure mode!) 2) meshing on layer 3 at least gives you very fast reconfiguration when links break. So in most community networks in Europe that I know (including funkfeuer.at) we use it actually as a fast redundant path selection protocol. (of course, we also actively develop and work on the olsr.org so we might one day end up with a multipath routing meshing daemon. this would be my dream) a. Greg On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:41 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: I agree with Faisal here... Our experience from the freifunk style networks in Europe is that a mix of backbone/mesh nodes and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Faisal Imtiaz fai...@snappydsl.net wrote: that's a few radio hops away from anywhere. And that's one reason why per-hop latency is all-critical To put things in context... from what we have seen typical latency between radios (for a single link) are between 1ms to 2ms... The Moto Canopy are an exception they have much higher latencybecause of what they do and how they do it so even if you are going thru 20 radios.. you are talking about 15-20 ms per-hop performance may be thougher than per-hop latency... it usually divides by 2, so n hops would be 1/2^n performance of the main node. Which could be fine if you can provide fairness to prevent a kind of capture effect of the nearest nodes. Rubens WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/19/2010 06:43 PM, Rubens Kuhl wrote: On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Faisal Imtiaz fai...@snappydsl.net wrote: that's a few radio hops away from anywhere. And that's one reason why per-hop latency is all-critical To put things in context... from what we have seen typical latency between radios (for a single link) are between 1ms to 2ms... The Moto Canopy are an exception they have much higher latencybecause of what they do and how they do it so even if you are going thru 20 radios.. you are talking about 15-20 ms per-hop performance may be thougher than per-hop latency... it usually divides by 2, so n hops would be 1/2^n performance of the main node. Which could be fine if you can provide fairness to prevent a kind of capture effect of the nearest nodes. This is one of the problems with any kind of best efforts routing or bridging. Loss does accumulate. Of course it's the single-frequency meshes where loss goes totally gaga. One of the advantages of Carrier Ethernet with Q-in-Q is that CIRs can be assigned to different points along the way, with reserved capacity, so the near-in nodes don't hog everything. I don't think HWMPplus does full CE, but it may have some tools to play with. If anybody can suggest a better software load for a field-mountable multi-radio processor, notably one that does MEF CE, I'm not wedded to MicroTik. This is interim, after all; we hope to have our own code at some point. On the Layer 2 v 3 thing, the distinction is artificial. Off the shelf, LAN-oriented L2 switching does dumb bridging, based on an assumption that it's all on-site with plenty of zero-cost orange hose bandwidth to play with. So STP just avoids loops. IP itself is really a layer 2 protocol too! This is non-obvious, but an IP address names the interface, not the application or host, and thus it is also a layer 2 address. TCP/IP doesn't even have a network layer, just this stub that assigns two-to-three-level second names (IP addresses to interfaces whose MAC address is totally flat. If you assign node IDs in Layer 2, it becomes smarter than IP, and IP can thus be run as a dumb stub protocol. (Suggested reading: Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals, by John Day.) -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :) Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... If you have a particular setup from the Wireline world in mind, you can always accomplish that by using wireline routers switches and just use the wireless radios as bridges...Mikrotik is one on the very few mfg. which offers a whole line up of products, which can be mixed and matched to do routing / switching / with wired or wireless connections.. and a consistent OS... Having said that, hopefully you will realize that all of the so called Wireless Radios available in the marketplace are nothing more than a SBC, with a Wireless Radio (chip), a specialized Antenna (if integrated) and a customer OS.. most of the time is either based on Linux / BSD or the same base OS that is used for developing the Wireline routers / switches. Most of the secret sauce that we all get excited about tends to be in the 'software Driver' of the raw radio card or the Antenna...the rest of the routing / switching / mgmt stuff, folks either accept what came with that particular radio or use their own preferred router /switch to accomplish. A great example of that is what Ubiquiti is doing with their M Series... their 'Radio' are running linux (based on openwrt) their special sauce is their proprietary driver talking to the actual radio card, and their Antennas.. First set of products are based on 802.11n standard... covering 2.4Ghz 5.XGhz... but there are planning to come up with radios running in 3.65 and (I am guessing here..) 900Mhz...running the same 'protocols' as 802.11n.. Actually seeing what 802.11n with Mimio antennas can do when compared to the traditional 802.11a/b/g... it is rather amazing. You can use their radios to do other stuff by modding the linux os they are running or simply using them just as a bridge, to connect your favorite routing / switching platform. BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the mesh networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making routing decision.. but you are not going to find OSLR in commercial radios not at the moment... If you look at all of the folks who are delivering successful mesh products, you will find them to be using 'proprietary' developed mechanisms to deal with the issues..e.g. Ruckus Wireless uses it's special antennas and a 'zone controller' to keep the Mesh radios in tip top shape, by dynamically adjusting all of the parameters on a real time basis.. As far as finding a multi-radio board... there are a few available best to see the link to Wili Box site that I had sent in an earlier email... they list out a number of mfg. for both the sbc's and the radios.. the question you will have to figure out is..on what part of the 'network design' ... 'ip routing ?' you will be willing to make a compromise on...and you still have not addressed the question of Antennas:) after using a good working 802.11n radios with MiMo Antennas... it is rather hard to go back to regular stuff... Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom On 6/19/2010 8:50 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: This is one of the problems with any kind of best efforts routing or bridging. Loss does accumulate. Of course it's the single-frequency meshes where loss goes totally gaga. One of the advantages of Carrier Ethernet with Q-in-Q is that CIRs can be assigned to different points along the way, with reserved capacity, so the near-in nodes don't hog everything. I don't think HWMPplus does full CE, but it may have some tools to play with. If anybody can suggest a better software load for a field-mountable multi-radio processor, notably one that does MEF CE, I'm not wedded to MicroTik. This is interim, after all; we hope to have our own code at some point. On the Layer 2 v 3 thing, the distinction is artificial. Off the shelf, LAN-oriented L2 switching does dumb bridging, based on an assumption that it's all on-site with plenty of zero-cost orange hose bandwidth to play with.
[WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
First off, I'd like to say hello to the list. Mike Hammett pointed me at it a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a wireless-related question (wireless in the trees) at isp-clec, and he reposted it here. This list is a lot more active... I've been reading the past few months archives and it's really quite informative. I'm a consultant working with competitive service providers all over the place. I don't run a WISP but some clients do. I am working now with a startup that wants to serve some unserved (no cable or DSL, just long-loop POTS/dial-up) remote territory which is about to get middle mile service to the nearest city (year-round pop. 10,000, but it's big for the area) thanks to a stimulus grant. The unserved last mile area covers a strip about 5 to 30 miles from the backbone point. It's the RF environment from hell: Heavily wooded and hilly. The most valuable strip of land is a long narrow beachfront strip a block or so wide, with a palisade (steep wooded hill) blocking it from the rest of the area. Plus it's convex (curves out into the big lake) so your line of sight within the beachside strip is very small. So in most places on the waterfront there's not even cellular service, since the cell sites are over the rim. No WISP is crazy enough to go there. My clients and I, however, are unusually crazy... why else would we be in the communications business? Given that environment, there only way to get to most of the subscribers is via multiple hops. We'd come down to the beach in at least two points near the ends, maybe in the middle too, and build microwave rings. I don't see how this could work with any of the canned mesh solutions. Most, like SkyPilot, only mesh at 5.8 Ghz, and there are some paths that are just too woody for that to work. Some of the subscriber access sites may need 900 too. I think each RF path and local-coverage cell will have to be engineered to local conditions. What looks to be the most flexible approach might be to use the MicroTik Routerboard multi-radio mPCI systems. Then we can use off-the-shelf 5.8 GHz cards and PtP antennas for the clear paths, and plug in the Ubiquiti XR9 or similar high-power 900 radio for tree blasting. User access would probably be sectorized at whatever band works. MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
We have done a number of deployments with this. --- Dennis Burgess, Mikrotik Certified Trainer Link Technologies, Inc -- Mikrotik WISP Support Services Office: 314-735-0270 Website: http://www.linktechs.net LIVE On-Line Mikrotik Training - Author of Learn RouterOS -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Fred R. Goldstein Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 3:23 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh? First off, I'd like to say hello to the list. Mike Hammett pointed me at it a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a wireless-related question (wireless in the trees) at isp-clec, and he reposted it here. This list is a lot more active... I've been reading the past few months archives and it's really quite informative. I'm a consultant working with competitive service providers all over the place. I don't run a WISP but some clients do. I am working now with a startup that wants to serve some unserved (no cable or DSL, just long-loop POTS/dial-up) remote territory which is about to get middle mile service to the nearest city (year-round pop. 10,000, but it's big for the area) thanks to a stimulus grant. The unserved last mile area covers a strip about 5 to 30 miles from the backbone point. It's the RF environment from hell: Heavily wooded and hilly. The most valuable strip of land is a long narrow beachfront strip a block or so wide, with a palisade (steep wooded hill) blocking it from the rest of the area. Plus it's convex (curves out into the big lake) so your line of sight within the beachside strip is very small. So in most places on the waterfront there's not even cellular service, since the cell sites are over the rim. No WISP is crazy enough to go there. My clients and I, however, are unusually crazy... why else would we be in the communications business? Given that environment, there only way to get to most of the subscribers is via multiple hops. We'd come down to the beach in at least two points near the ends, maybe in the middle too, and build microwave rings. I don't see how this could work with any of the canned mesh solutions. Most, like SkyPilot, only mesh at 5.8 Ghz, and there are some paths that are just too woody for that to work. Some of the subscriber access sites may need 900 too. I think each RF path and local-coverage cell will have to be engineered to local conditions. What looks to be the most flexible approach might be to use the MicroTik Routerboard multi-radio mPCI systems. Then we can use off-the-shelf 5.8 GHz cards and PtP antennas for the clear paths, and plug in the Ubiquiti XR9 or similar high-power 900 radio for tree blasting. User access would probably be sectorized at whatever band works. MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
On Jun 18, 2010, at 4:33 PM, Dennis Burgess wrote: MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! IMHO it does not scale... is not documented and built on an outdated rip-off copy of another protocol which already developed further and fixed some major scalability issues. But please, do not get discouraged and in case HWMPplus does indeed work with more than 100 nodes, let me know and I would be very interested in how you managed to do that. Of course, your mileage or your needs might differ. Best regards, L. Aaron Kaplan (http://olsr.org, http://www.funkfeuer.at) WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/18/2010 04:47 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: On Jun 18, 2010, at 4:33 PM, Dennis Burgess wrote: (I wrote:) MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! IMHO it does not scale... is not documented and built on an outdated rip-off copy of another protocol which already developed further and fixed some major scalability issues. MT says that it's an incompatible extension of an early draft of HWMP. I don't know where HWMP is now or why they forked it. But we're looking for an off-the-shelf short term solution, while we, uh, work on the long-term answer. The nice thing about Routerboards is that you can run other Linux code on them... But please, do not get discouraged and in case HWMPplus does indeed work with more than 100 nodes, let me know and I would be very interested in how you managed to do that. Of course, your mileage or your needs might differ. The site I have in mind would need fewer than 50 nodes. So how many hops and how many nodes would be reasonable limits for HWMPplus? -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Look at one of our vendor members, higher cost than roll your own, but everything in one box, server, radius, etc., etc. It may prove to be a lower cost for a difficult start up and difficult area, leading to better customer satisfaction and word of mouth advertising, faster ROI and penetration. http://www.bluemesh.net -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Fred R. Goldstein Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:23 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh? First off, I'd like to say hello to the list. Mike Hammett pointed me at it a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a wireless-related question (wireless in the trees) at isp-clec, and he reposted it here. This list is a lot more active... I've been reading the past few months archives and it's really quite informative. I'm a consultant working with competitive service providers all over the place. I don't run a WISP but some clients do. I am working now with a startup that wants to serve some unserved (no cable or DSL, just long-loop POTS/dial-up) remote territory which is about to get middle mile service to the nearest city (year-round pop. 10,000, but it's big for the area) thanks to a stimulus grant. The unserved last mile area covers a strip about 5 to 30 miles from the backbone point. It's the RF environment from hell: Heavily wooded and hilly. The most valuable strip of land is a long narrow beachfront strip a block or so wide, with a palisade (steep wooded hill) blocking it from the rest of the area. Plus it's convex (curves out into the big lake) so your line of sight within the beachside strip is very small. So in most places on the waterfront there's not even cellular service, since the cell sites are over the rim. No WISP is crazy enough to go there. My clients and I, however, are unusually crazy... why else would we be in the communications business? Given that environment, there only way to get to most of the subscribers is via multiple hops. We'd come down to the beach in at least two points near the ends, maybe in the middle too, and build microwave rings. I don't see how this could work with any of the canned mesh solutions. Most, like SkyPilot, only mesh at 5.8 Ghz, and there are some paths that are just too woody for that to work. Some of the subscriber access sites may need 900 too. I think each RF path and local-coverage cell will have to be engineered to local conditions. What looks to be the most flexible approach might be to use the MicroTik Routerboard multi-radio mPCI systems. Then we can use off-the-shelf 5.8 GHz cards and PtP antennas for the clear paths, and plug in the Ubiquiti XR9 or similar high-power 900 radio for tree blasting. User access would probably be sectorized at whatever band works. MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Hi Fred, In my opinion there is bit of an oxymoron in your original question / thought.. On-one hand you are looking for a Mesh product, which implies a self configuring / self healing product... but you are also pointing out that this is not going to work as a whole and you will have to Engineer the links because of the Terrain etc... Typically most folks think of a deployment as one (Mesh... turn on, let it self connect / self configure etc) or the other .. Engineered Link Engineered Routing Protocol Are you sure this is what you are needing ? You can very easily do a hybrid approach.. where you have an Engineered Back Bone Links (these could be fully meshed, using OSPF or OSLR..etc) and you can do local distribution using a Mesh protocol if it want to make it easy for the EndUsers connection With this you can mix and match protocol /equipment / radios etc. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 5:20 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/18/2010 04:47 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: On Jun 18, 2010, at 4:33 PM, Dennis Burgess wrote: (I wrote:) MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! IMHO it does not scale... is not documented and built on an outdated rip-off copy of another protocol which already developed further and fixed some major scalability issues. MT says that it's an incompatible extension of an early draft of HWMP. I don't know where HWMP is now or why they forked it. But we're looking for an off-the-shelf short term solution, while we, uh, work on the long-term answer. The nice thing about Routerboards is that you can run other Linux code on them... But please, do not get discouraged and in case HWMPplus does indeed work with more than 100 nodes, let me know and I would be very interested in how you managed to do that. Of course, your mileage or your needs might differ. The site I have in mind would need fewer than 50 nodes. So how many hops and how many nodes would be reasonable limits for HWMPplus? -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/18/2010 05:49 PM, Chuck Profito wrote: Look at one of our vendor members, higher cost than roll your own, but everything in one box, server, radius, etc., etc. It may prove to be a lower cost for a difficult start up and difficult area, leading to better customer satisfaction and word of mouth advertising, faster ROI and penetration. http://www.bluemesh.net This doesn't look too much unlike what we had in mind, hardware-wise; we would have a vendor (who might be a WISPA member; it might go to bid) configure the boxes to our spec. Bluemesh seems to be using Ubiquiti rather than Microtik routers, and I like its 117v feed (since we'll probably mount a lot of these on power poles). Frankly UBNT and MT companies seem to be competing quite directly on a lot of these products, so it's not a big deal which one to use. UBNT is running OpenWRT Kamikaze code, while MT has their own RouterOS. It's not clear if Bluemesh is basing its system on Kamikaze or something else. Indeed there's a dearth of information on the Bluemesh site to say what it can do. Not even a flyer on the radios, their power, etc. At this point we're wide open to suggestions. Bear in mind that we are not looking for an IP solution, but for a Layer 1 or Layer 2 mesh. (SkyPilot is layer 1, with Ethernet at the edges. Perfect except for frequency agility. An it ain't cheap.) So tell me more... -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Fred R. Goldstein Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:23 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh? First off, I'd like to say hello to the list. Mike Hammett pointed me at it a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a wireless-related question (wireless in the trees) at isp-clec, and he reposted it here. This list is a lot more active... I've been reading the past few months archives and it's really quite informative. I'm a consultant working with competitive service providers all over the place. I don't run a WISP but some clients do. I am working now with a startup that wants to serve some unserved (no cable or DSL, just long-loop POTS/dial-up) remote territory which is about to get middle mile service to the nearest city (year-round pop. 10,000, but it's big for the area) thanks to a stimulus grant. The unserved last mile area covers a strip about 5 to 30 miles from the backbone point. It's the RF environment from hell: Heavily wooded and hilly. The most valuable strip of land is a long narrow beachfront strip a block or so wide, with a palisade (steep wooded hill) blocking it from the rest of the area. Plus it's convex (curves out into the big lake) so your line of sight within the beachside strip is very small. So in most places on the waterfront there's not even cellular service, since the cell sites are over the rim. No WISP is crazy enough to go there. My clients and I, however, are unusually crazy... why else would we be in the communications business? Given that environment, there only way to get to most of the subscribers is via multiple hops. We'd come down to the beach in at least two points near the ends, maybe in the middle too, and build microwave rings. I don't see how this could work with any of the canned mesh solutions. Most, like SkyPilot, only mesh at 5.8 Ghz, and there are some paths that are just too woody for that to work. Some of the subscriber access sites may need 900 too. I think each RF path and local-coverage cell will have to be engineered to local conditions. What looks to be the most flexible approach might be to use the MicroTik Routerboard multi-radio mPCI systems. Then we can use off-the-shelf 5.8 GHz cards and PtP antennas for the clear paths, and plug in the Ubiquiti XR9 or similar high-power 900 radio for tree blasting. User access would probably be sectorized at whatever band works. MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line, though, and a distributor I've been talking to has never tried or sold it. So does anyone on the list have any experience with the HWMPplus mesh? Or any other suggestions? Thanks! -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
A couple of more folks to look at Keeping in mind that they type of a Mesh Solution you are looking for is more of an 'integration' of off-the shelf products.. If you wish to roll your own these folks can provide you with Mesh Software to run on your choice of single board routers..and radios.. http://www.wilibox.com/products/wili-mesh Another set of folks who possibly do a custom design integration http://www.meshdynamics.com Regards Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 6:19 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/18/2010 05:49 PM, Chuck Profito wrote: Look at one of our vendor members, higher cost than roll your own, but everything in one box, server, radius, etc., etc. It may prove to be a lower cost for a difficult start up and difficult area, leading to better customer satisfaction and word of mouth advertising, faster ROI and penetration. http://www.bluemesh.net This doesn't look too much unlike what we had in mind, hardware-wise; we would have a vendor (who might be a WISPA member; it might go to bid) configure the boxes to our spec. Bluemesh seems to be using Ubiquiti rather than Microtik routers, and I like its 117v feed (since we'll probably mount a lot of these on power poles). Frankly UBNT and MT companies seem to be competing quite directly on a lot of these products, so it's not a big deal which one to use. UBNT is running OpenWRT Kamikaze code, while MT has their own RouterOS. It's not clear if Bluemesh is basing its system on Kamikaze or something else. Indeed there's a dearth of information on the Bluemesh site to say what it can do. Not even a flyer on the radios, their power, etc. At this point we're wide open to suggestions. Bear in mind that we are not looking for an IP solution, but for a Layer 1 or Layer 2 mesh. (SkyPilot is layer 1, with Ethernet at the edges. Perfect except for frequency agility. An it ain't cheap.) So tell me more... -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Fred R. Goldstein Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:23 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh? First off, I'd like to say hello to the list. Mike Hammett pointed me at it a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a wireless-related question (wireless in the trees) at isp-clec, and he reposted it here. This list is a lot more active... I've been reading the past few months archives and it's really quite informative. I'm a consultant working with competitive service providers all over the place. I don't run a WISP but some clients do. I am working now with a startup that wants to serve some unserved (no cable or DSL, just long-loop POTS/dial-up) remote territory which is about to get middle mile service to the nearest city (year-round pop.10,000, but it's big for the area) thanks to a stimulus grant. The unserved last mile area covers a strip about 5 to 30 miles from the backbone point. It's the RF environment from hell: Heavily wooded and hilly. The most valuable strip of land is a long narrow beachfront strip a block or so wide, with a palisade (steep wooded hill) blocking it from the rest of the area. Plus it's convex (curves out into the big lake) so your line of sight within the beachside strip is very small. So in most places on the waterfront there's not even cellular service, since the cell sites are over the rim. No WISP is crazy enough to go there. My clients and I, however, are unusually crazy... why else would we be in the communications business? Given that environment, there only way to get to most of the subscribers is via multiple hops. We'd come down to the beach in at least two points near the ends, maybe in the middle too, and build microwave rings. I don't see how this could work with any of the canned mesh solutions. Most, like SkyPilot, only mesh at 5.8 Ghz, and there are some paths that are just too woody for that to work. Some of the subscriber access sites may need 900 too. I think each RF path and local-coverage cell will have to be engineered to local conditions. What looks to be the most flexible approach might be to use the MicroTik Routerboard multi-radio mPCI systems. Then we can use off-the-shelf 5.8 GHz cards and PtP antennas for the clear paths, and plug in the Ubiquiti XR9 or similar high-power 900 radio for tree blasting. User access would probably be sectorized at whatever band works. MicroTik says they have a meshing protocol, HWMPplus, that provides Layer 2 (this is critical; we're not building a Layer 3 network, and with this many hops, latency and loss are critical) dynamic meshing, essentially applying a routing protocol (smarter than bridge STPs) among nodes. I can't find any documentation for it on line
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/18/2010 05:52 PM, you wrote: Hi Fred, In my opinion there is bit of an oxymoron in your original question / thought.. On-one hand you are looking for a Mesh product, which implies a self configuring / self healing product... but you are also pointing out that this is not going to work as a whole and you will have to Engineer the links because of the Terrain etc... Typically most folks think of a deployment as one (Mesh... turn on, let it self connect / self configure etc) or the other .. Engineered Link Engineered Routing Protocol Are you sure this is what you are needing ? You can very easily do a hybrid approach.. where you have an Engineered Back Bone Links (these could be fully meshed, using OSPF or OSLR..etc) and you can do local distribution using a Mesh protocol if it want to make it easy for the EndUsers connection With this you can mix and match protocol /equipment / radios etc. It's a question of semantics. I use mesh to refer to the topology, and to having more radios than injection points. Yes, it needs to be self-healing, and to some extent may be self-configuring, but that's software. The radio links are all engineered; it's too difficult a location to do otherwise. -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Even mesh networks have to be engineered, especially if you want it to work well. One could just scatter mesh radios and that would give self-configuration and self-healing but the performance wouldn't be good. To get self-healing you have to have redundancy and then you start getting into self-interference and frequency-reuse issues. The commercial grade mesh gear is better but quite expensive. Probably a better way would be to use a standard back haul with access point network and if you want redundancy put in extra back hauls and extra access points. The back hauls could switch over automatically, and the AP's would just need be commanded on or off. If the back hauls can be arranged such that they are in a ring topology, then you would have the back haul redundancy without a lot of extra hardware. Greg I'm not sure you really need the mesh topology. That's better suited to On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:12 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: It's a question of semantics. I use mesh to refer to the topology, and to having more radios than injection points. Yes, it needs to be self-healing, and to some extent may be self-configuring, but that's software. The radio links are all engineered; it's too difficult a location to do otherwise. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Hi! Typically most folks think of a deployment as one (Mesh... turn on, let it self connect / self configure etc) or the other .. Engineered Link Engineered Routing Protocol Are you sure this is what you are needing ? You can very easily do a hybrid approach.. where you have an Engineered Back Bone Links (these could be fully meshed, using OSPF or OSLR..etc) and you can do local distribution using a Mesh protocol if it want to make it easy for the EndUsers connection With this you can mix and match protocol /equipment / radios etc. I agree with Faisal here... Our experience from the freifunk style networks in Europe is that a mix of backbone/mesh nodes and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
By the way - I forgot to say that OLSR.org does run on Mikrotik (with some minor tricks on getting a pkg installed ;-) Are you sure this is what you are needing ? You can very easily do a hybrid approach.. where you have an Engineered Back Bone Links (these could be fully meshed, using OSPF or OSLR..etc) and you can do local distribution using a Mesh protocol if it want to make it easy for the EndUsers connection With this you can mix and match protocol /equipment / radios etc. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. Greg On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:41 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: I agree with Faisal here... Our experience from the freifunk style networks in Europe is that a mix of backbone/mesh nodes and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Greg, With all due respect, while you statements may be accurate for particular situations, but they are totally inaccurate for other situations. These Generic statements do not hold true for today Mesh networks. e.g. You can deploy a Ruckus Wireless Mesh, (they now have both indoor outdoor solution) where the radios self configure ...from the zone flex controller and you will not have any 'engineering', 'performance' or 'self-interference' , frequency-reuse issues Commercial grade mesh stuff is expensive, because of the 'secret sauce' they use to manage all of the above key items you pointed out.. Today, all of the folks who are deploying 'Mesh' topology are really trying to address some particular key set of challenges for that particular deployment...even if they don't realize it...As such there are solutions available that address such conditions However having a Mesh Network to solve all issues, in all conditions, for any circumstance...is wishful thinking. I completely agree with your last statements... and this is exactly what I was also trying to imply and suggest to Fred. To Fred.. I am not sure as to why you want to build a L2 network.but as a 'mesh' and L2 tend not to be two things that go together well (sames challenges such as 'meshing' Ethernet switches..!) would being able to do 'Ethernet Emulation' on IP e.g. EoIP or MPLS cover your network requirements ? Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 6:59 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Even mesh networks have to be engineered, especially if you want it to work well. One could just scatter mesh radios and that would give self-configuration and self-healing but the performance wouldn't be good. To get self-healing you have to have redundancy and then you start getting into self-interference and frequency-reuse issues. The commercial grade mesh gear is better but quite expensive. Probably a better way would be to use a standard back haul with access point network and if you want redundancy put in extra back hauls and extra access points. The back hauls could switch over automatically, and the AP's would just need be commanded on or off. If the back hauls can be arranged such that they are in a ring topology, then you would have the back haul redundancy without a lot of extra hardware. Greg I'm not sure you really need the mesh topology. That's better suited to On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:12 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: It's a question of semantics. I use mesh to refer to the topology, and to having more radios than injection points. Yes, it needs to be self-healing, and to some extent may be self-configuring, but that's software. The radio links are all engineered; it's too difficult a location to do otherwise. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.. e.g. There are a number of large mesh networks (or mess-networks) using Meraki / Open Mesh etc... (in these cases, the Mesh is used for being able to provide access to end users, while the Internet Connection is feed at multiple pointsvia separate connections... needless to say quality and speed of the connections is not a major requirement ... best effort services ... but resiliency and self configuration is the goal..) :) Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 7:21 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. Greg On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:41 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: I agree with Faisal here... Our experience from the freifunk style networks in Europe is that a mix of backbone/mesh nodes and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
At 6/18/2010 07:21 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. There's more than one type of mesh out there, and I may need to be clearer. The first generation WiFi mesh, with the same frequency used for access and meshing, was a bad joke. It reminded me of the AX.25 digipeater networks that we played with in the 1980s. They demonstrated, in slow motion, what didn't work! The early Trangos, I think, were like that. They could mesh about one hop from the injection point. At that point in time I discounted mesh networks as a bad idea. Then came multi-frequency meshes. These do the backhaul on one frequency and access on another. (Okay, SkyPilot can use the same frequency for both, but it's layer 1 synchronous. That works too.) This is what I'm talking about. Probably a better way would be to use a standard back haul with access point network and if you want redundancy put in extra back hauls and extra access points. The back hauls could switch over automatically, and the AP's would just need be commanded on or off. Well, that's what the hardware might look like. A typical box would have three radios, two for a backhaul chain and one for access, or maybe more access radios if sectorized. We can't use standard one-hop backhaul because the customers are in a tough location (basically wedged between a rock and a wet place) that's a few radio hops away from anywhere. And that's one reason why per-hop latency is all-critical. I could put a chain of back-to-back radios there, but would run out of frequencies and room on the poles/towers before I got a few hops in... I need to extract some of the signal at several stops along the chain. I've been playing with RadioMobile and while I think its land cover forest-loss computations are *way* optimistic (even pushing it to 180%), it has helped identify the only possible ways in and out. I call that a mesh... but it has nothing in common with urban meshes, LAN meshes, or those awful home-router toys. Aaron added, .. and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) I don't want a layer 2 broadcast mesh, actually. I'm thinking more in terms of Carrier Ethernet, if I can make that work. It's switched, not bridged. Huge difference. I've got some bridged-network horror stories to tell myself, and I don't like bridging. But suffice to say that the project in question is not exactly a pure IP network. That's a story for another time though. Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. HMWPplus seems to be doing an SPF protocol among nodes, at a layer below IP. That seems right to me. BTW I'm pretty familiar with SPF routing concepts. Way back in 1986 or so, I started writing RSPF, an SPF routing protocol for IP over radio. A couple of guys implemented it, more or less, in Linux, in the 1990s. But it's pretty much forgotten. I've moved past IP; it's just so T.C. So I am really open to suggestions, and I hope I've made my requirements clearer. This is a challenge to serve the most impossible place we know of; our second expected project area some miles away looks to be just a bit easier. (Still convex beach and wooded hills, but it doesn't look as steep.) -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
Hi Aaron, Any one installed OSLR on Ubiquiti M Series ? Any info / instructions on that ? Thanks. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 7:12 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: By the way - I forgot to say that OLSR.org does run on Mikrotik (with some minor tricks on getting a pkg installed ;-) Are you sure this is what you are needing ? You can very easily do a hybrid approach.. where you have an Engineered Back Bone Links (these could be fully meshed, using OSPF or OSLR..etc) and you can do local distribution using a Mesh protocol if it want to make it easy for the EndUsers connection With this you can mix and match protocol /equipment / radios etc. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
that's a few radio hops away from anywhere. And that's one reason why per-hop latency is all-critical To put things in context... from what we have seen typical latency between radios (for a single link) are between 1ms to 2ms... The Moto Canopy are an exception they have much higher latencybecause of what they do and how they do it so even if you are going thru 20 radios.. you are talking about 15-20 ms Unless of-course the link is saturated or performing poorly due to poor signal. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet Telecom 7266 SW 48 Street Miami, Fl 33155 Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Helpdesk: 305 663 5518 option 2 Email: supp...@snappydsl.net On 6/18/2010 8:27 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: At 6/18/2010 07:21 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. There's more than one type of mesh out there, and I may need to be clearer. The first generation WiFi mesh, with the same frequency used for access and meshing, was a bad joke. It reminded me of the AX.25 digipeater networks that we played with in the 1980s. They demonstrated, in slow motion, what didn't work! The early Trangos, I think, were like that. They could mesh about one hop from the injection point. At that point in time I discounted mesh networks as a bad idea. Then came multi-frequency meshes. These do the backhaul on one frequency and access on another. (Okay, SkyPilot can use the same frequency for both, but it's layer 1 synchronous. That works too.) This is what I'm talking about. Probably a better way would be to use a standard back haul with access point network and if you want redundancy put in extra back hauls and extra access points. The back hauls could switch over automatically, and the AP's would just need be commanded on or off. Well, that's what the hardware might look like. A typical box would have three radios, two for a backhaul chain and one for access, or maybe more access radios if sectorized. We can't use standard one-hop backhaul because the customers are in a tough location (basically wedged between a rock and a wet place) that's a few radio hops away from anywhere. And that's one reason why per-hop latency is all-critical. I could put a chain of back-to-back radios there, but would run out of frequencies and room on the poles/towers before I got a few hops in... I need to extract some of the signal at several stops along the chain. I've been playing with RadioMobile and while I think its land cover forest-loss computations are *way* optimistic (even pushing it to 180%), it has helped identify the only possible ways in and out. I call that a mesh... but it has nothing in common with urban meshes, LAN meshes, or those awful home-router toys. Aaron added, .. and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) I don't want a layer 2 broadcast mesh, actually. I'm thinking more in terms of Carrier Ethernet, if I can make that work. It's switched, not bridged. Huge difference. I've got some bridged-network horror stories to tell myself, and I don't like bridging. But suffice to say that the project in question is not exactly a pure IP network. That's a story for another time though. Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. HMWPplus seems to be doing an SPF protocol among nodes, at a layer below IP. That seems right to me. BTW I'm pretty familiar with SPF routing concepts. Way back in 1986 or so, I started writing RSPF, an SPF routing protocol for IP over radio. A couple of guys implemented it, more or less, in Linux, in the 1990s. But it's pretty much forgotten. I've moved past IP; it's just so T.C. So I am really open to suggestions, and I hope I've made my requirements clearer. This is a challenge to serve the most impossible place we know of; our second expected project area some miles away looks to be just a bit easier. (Still convex beach and wooded hills, but it doesn't look as steep.) -- Fred Goldsteink1io fgoldstein at ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
On Jun 18, 2010, at 7:21 PM, Greg Ihnen wrote: Are you seeing benefits from the mesh approach that you wouldn't get from backhaul/APs? Doesn't the mesh gear usually have omni-directional antennas which can be problematic in an RF polluted environment. Yes, note two things please: 1) you can of course also have a mesh approach with point2multipoint (and even in infrastructure mode!) 2) meshing on layer 3 at least gives you very fast reconfiguration when links break. So in most community networks in Europe that I know (including funkfeuer.at) we use it actually as a fast redundant path selection protocol. (of course, we also actively develop and work on the olsr.org so we might one day end up with a multipath routing meshing daemon. this would be my dream) a. Greg On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:41 PM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote: I agree with Faisal here... Our experience from the freifunk style networks in Europe is that a mix of backbone/mesh nodes and layer 3 meshing gets the job done. Why layer 3? Because you don't want it all to be a single layer 2 broadcast area :) Your spectrum is just too valuable to send every broadcast message to all others in the network. Combine that with BGP/OSPF/whatever backbone links which are built point to point (or point to a few multipoints) with high capacity and you are set. This way you can even have layer 2 meshes interoperating with different meshes or OSPF/BGP/IS-IS/whatever protocol backbone networks. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] MicroTik HWMPplus mesh?
On Jun 18, 2010, at 8:36 PM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote: Hi Aaron, Any one installed OSLR on Ubiquiti M Series ? Any info / instructions on that ? I will check that - but we for sure installed it on other AirOS systems. In general (this is one of the big advantage of OLSR being on layer 3) , OLSR will run on any linux (or BSD) based system without modifications. Simply need to re-compile it. A. Once I get back to Vienna, I might just try that and document it on the olsr.org webppage. Unless someone else beats me to it :)) WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
