Re: mesh beaconing questions

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

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Javier,


> Beaconing and synchronization are the two areas that are still
> actively debated at TGs, and they are somewhat dependent (
> http://odysseus.ieee.org/cs.html?charset=iso-8859-1&url=http%3A//mentor.ieee.org/802.11/public-file/07/11-07-2853-00-000s-functional-interdependences.ppt&qt=url%3Amentor.ieee.org/802.11+||+jarkko+kneckt&col=mentor&n=2&la=en
> ). I would not invest much time in trying to support both modes at
> this time.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I'll see what documents show up :)

> That said, if things stay as they are now, we would have to make that
> configurable (only if the driver supports both beaconing modes, of
> course).

Ok.

> > (...)
> > Hence, I think the draft needs to be expanded to modify 11.1.2.2 to
> > explain under which circumstances an MP shall cancel its beacon if it
> > opts to use IBSS-like beaconing.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > I think the only useful thing is to require it to look at the mesh IEs,
> 
> ... and path selection method and metric.

Good point.

> > but that is not implementable with existing hardware, at least not
> > without firmware changes.
> 
> Needing firmware changes is a problem for o11s, but not for TGs:

True, but I think just like with o11s the adoption rate will be much
higher if it's easy to implement with existing hardware/firmware. Of
course, anybody who runs firmware can do the trivial firmware
modification for such a requirement.

> there will be other firmware (and maybe hardware) changes required to
> implement the standard.  o11s challenge is to do as much as possible
> with commodity hardware, and doing IBSS beaconing with null BSSID
> seems like an OK compromise.  Every once in a while and MP may cancel
> a beacon transmission because it receives a beacon from a different
> mesh:  that's not such a big deal.

Yeah, good point, it doesn't really matter too much.

> PS.  BTW, you should attend the IEEE meetings.  Really!

I have attended the London session (in 2007) but didn't find it worth
spending that much money on :)

johannes

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