On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 09:31:31AM +0100, Julian Bond wrote: > First the environment. With Meshnetworks, Locustworld and others we're > seeing the emergence of technology that makes it comparatively easy to > link WLANs. Initially this will be a whole load of small scale > experiments with two or three APs linked at a time. But there will be > local pockets where we get a sudden "Mesh Disease" outbreak, and the > borders of many pockets touch, creating meshes with 100s of APs. This is > the epidemic model in disease transmission where isolated hotspots merge > to become a pandemic. At this point, a client device talking to another > client device within this meshed area have got numerous alternate > potential routes between them. Some are purely within the mesh, some go > via gateways in and out of the wider internet. Similarly, a meshed > client device talking to a server somewhere on the internet may also > have multiple potential routes through the mesh and then through > multiple mesh-internet gateways. > > So all I've done here is describe (probably imperfectly) the current > problem. Has anyone got any solutions?
Is this a current problem? This sounds to me like a problem in the far-off future. I am aware of only two not-for-profit, ad hoc wireless networking projects, the Kingsbridge network and the modest network we've built here in Urbana. We have six nodes in two networks in Urbana. I think that Kingsbridge has six nodes in one network. At six nodes or less, these networks are a long way from the routing breakdown you describe. I suggest that people who aspire to build an ad hoc wireless network do not concentrate on the hard problems until they become hard problems. Hard problems that have needlessly distracted our tiny group in Urbana include channel allocation and scalability. We only found out the real problems when we started building things. As usual, the devil was in the details; details of 802.11 IBSS network coalescence, 802.11 multicast lossage, NetBSD's ARP implementation, and Prism2.x firmware bugs have been worse problems for us than the routing, which has ordinarily "just worked." Dave -- David Young OJC Technologies [EMAIL PROTECTED] Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
