[lime-dev] Using 11s as link layer instead of adhoc

Hi. As some of you already know, the last days I have been testing the possibility of use 802.11s as link layer instead of adhoc. By default 11s comes with a kind of layer2 routing (same as bat-adv does) by using HWMP (hybrid wireless mesh protocol) which in general is quite shitty compared to other well known solutions. However, if the option mesh_fwding is set to 0, this l2 routing layer is disabled and 11s can be used just as layer1 protocol in the same level of Ad-Hoc or AP/Infrastructure. From OpenWRt these are the needed options to enable 11s as link layer: uci set wireless.mesh0.mode=mesh uci set wireless.mesh0.mesh_id=wibed uci set wireless.mesh0.mesh_fwding=0 Using 11s instead of adhoc for deploying our mesh networks can bring some interesting features, among others: 1. Better support for 11n 2. Better compatibility with drivers (probably even ath_htc works fine) 3. You can bridge it to another interface if necessary. 4. It does NOT try to synchronize the TSF counter of your wifi card thus you can create up to 8 11s VAP mixed with adhoc, AP, client, etc... 5. I don't know deeply 11s but it probably has better design for deploying mesh networks I've been testing it in a 12 nodes mesh network mixing it with bmx6 and it worked as a charm. No more "strange" problems coming from the adhoc layer. Yesterday Gio the great added support for 11s in libre-mesh [1]. So now we only need to test it a bit more with our already crazy network architecture, so it may became even a bit more crazy for traditional mesh folks (bmx6+bat-adv+11s, never done something like that!). Opinion? Concerns? Ideas? [1] https://github.com/libre-mesh/lime-packages/tree/feature/80211s -- ./p4u