Larry Press wrote:Have any of you folks looked at the WiMAX mesh specification? If so, what
do you think.
I think it seems reasonable for a commercial deployment, but the tree structure and TDMA things they advocate might be a bit too rigid for a more anarchic consumer-owned network. However, I never saw the mesh spec, only some presentation on the topic, from Nokia.
The general feeling I get from the 802.16 spec is that _everything_ is in there. To me, that has a bad smell to it, and I've heard comments drawing a parallel to wireless ATM, which had similar characteristics, and flopped miserably.
The huge success of 802.11 might prove a big hurdle to its younger brother, which apparently feels it has something to prove. ;-)
Except for very specific situations, I prefer to mesh at layer 3 with OLSR or TBRPF.
Interesting. Among the mesh networking products out there, there seems to be a divided camp.
From an ease of use perspective, one might think that layer 2 meshing is better, since the clients won't need to know anything: the whole mesh just looks like a LAN to them, for service discovery etc. That might help if one wanted to deploy, let's say, a windows file server, or a DHCP server in the mesh network.
One might also take the historical approach, and say that layer 3 was created to connect multiple lower-layer networks (it's the inter-network layer). From that point of view, it seems hard to argue that a mesh network should be considered an internetwork. However, there might exist good reasons to regard each "cell" as its own LAN, with layer 3 connecting the cells.
Would you care to share what you feel the relative advantages of layer 3 meshing are?
- Jakob
