Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Questions about hardware

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Questions about hardware

[Sven Eckelmann]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1885 bytes --]

[Please try to not contact me directly when it is about B.A.T.M.A.N. related 
 things and at least Cc the official mailing list]

On Montag, 5. März 2018 19:04:29 CET Paul Becue wrote:
> We are working on a device with a mesh network. We are doing tests with 
> WiFi ad-hoc networks, and we tested last week BATMAN-adv and also babeld 
> on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Ralink dongle attached to it. The results 
> were very good.
[..]
> Could you give me some hints where I have to look for hardware and what 
> kind of hardware I have to look for? I have the impression that there is 
> something that I don't see in the whole story. I hope ad-hoc WiFi is 
> still a technology that is up to date. Or is there a technology that 
> replaces it?

Yes, IBSS is becoming a problem at the moment. You can try QCA ath10k hardware 
with Ben Greears firmware [1] or Mediathek with the mt76 driver [2] when you 
want up-to-date HW. There is still some ath9k based stuff around when 802.11n 
is enough.

Otherwise you might try to replace IBSS with meshpoint interfaces. Just setup 
it like 802.11s but with forwarding disabled [3]. This works at least with 
ath10k based HW and the official QCA ath10k firmware.

But HW which uses ath10k and other things which uses special firmware which 
prevents you from using your "own" rate control algorith are a no-go when 
you want to use throughput based metrics (as in B.A.T.M.A.N. V or olsrd2). 
Then you should stick either with ath9k or mt76 compatible HW.

Btw. my tests of mt76 showed performance and stability problems in the past. 
This may have changed by recent fixes in the driver but I don't know the
current state.

Kind regards,
	Sven

[1] https://www.candelatech.com/ath10k.php
[2] https://github.com/openwrt/mt76
[3] http://openwrt-devel.openwrt.narkive.com/Bieu1aRR/ath10k-mesh-with-openwrt-question

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part. --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]