[IAEP] "Mesh" Dreams = OLSR

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Reuben K. Caron <reuben at laptop.org> wrote:
> Where Mesh != 802.11s but rather an adhoc, self healing, self
> organizing routable network.

Cerebro gave a great working demo of what you describe. Don't know how
they compare.

I think it is perfectly feasible to achieve what you want...

 - to do it seamlessly and with polish will take a ton of work

 - very few users will actually benefit because the "under a tree"
scenario covers IMHO most of our interesting use cases.

People do talk about having a mesh that covers their whole town, and
it's great dream but not achievable with our current constraints

 - town-wide meshes are made of stationary nodes

 - the "mesh" approaches we're discussing burn CPU / battery...

 - perennially power-starved users will focus on use, not on
maintaining the communal mesh up

> Imagine a world where Sugar on a Stick machines can communicate on the
> same network as an XO laptop

We have that now with ad-hoc and infra. Limited but we have it.

> A world where mesh capabilities are
> hardware agnostic allowing anyone to bring up a mesh network by
> booting a live cd.

Mesh is pixie dust for most people. Your 'imagine' lines will make the
imagine things that cannot be made to work _in the way people
imagine_. Some meshy things can be made to work in a lab. Others just
involve tradeoffs no sane user would take on...

We've had bazillion threads about this, because mesh stokes passion.
Problem is... even if you had the magical code right now working
seamlessly... the cost/benefit ratio isn't good.

cheers,



m
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