John, you'll actually do a lot better if you multihome at the IP layer rather than at the lower layers. Multihoming is when you have a network that is connected to the internet via two or more gateways at the same time. Usually both load balancing, and reliability (automatic fail-over) are both reasons to multihome. MeshAP does not feature multihoming the last time I read about it. It's possible to have multiple gateways but each client node is only able to connect to one. But, I'm out of date because I got tired of the silliness in the meshAP community personally.

On the other hand, I am in contact with the IETF working group on multihoming in IPv6 and I take every opportunity to remind them of the potential uses in a meshed system. Also there has been some discussion on this list and off-list about a meshed system that would be capable of multihoming. It might be possible to retrofit MeshAP to do multihoming even? I don't know. There is also the "pebble" mesh project perhaps they can help with that.

As you say, it's "easy" to do multihoming if you don't mind tunnelling all your traffic to a single router but that eats up the bandwidth ... the true solution would be to design a mesh that can handle multihoming built-in. I *think* that there are projects to do just that, in the realm of "mobile ad-hoc" networking (check out the iETF MANET group) but I'm not clear on whether than applies to the "fixed" ad-hoc mesh networking case or not.

simon

On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 10:07 AM, John Taylor wrote:

I am running a small community wisp in the wilds of the uk
Network topology is 3 villages each networked within themselves via the
locust world MeshAP, each village then being connected via a wireless
'provider' node to a wireless backbone
The  wireless backbone is then extended via a wireless backhaul and
terminates in a local town
I use `bandwidth arbitrator` to manage bandwidth demand at the internet
gateway
However one of the villages recently had the local  exchange ADSL
enabled and I plan to connect one of the nodes directly to the internet
My question is has anybody come across any software that will
A. Load balance between the two internet  gateways and/or
B. Provide fail-over to the other internet connection
I assume multi point to point is the solution to (A)
My router at the present gateway provides (B), but that means traffic
has to travel up the backhaul to the router, then back down it to the
connected village -not very efficient!
Any help gratefully received
John Taylor
www.svw.org.uk


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