[IAEP] "Mesh" Dreams = OLSR

[C. Scott Ananian]

I'm not 100% certain we've pulled in members of the OLSR mailing lists
on this thread yet.

But they've actually got a number of very impressive *real world*
demonstrations of OLSRd in the wild.  You'll have to search the devel@
archives for 'olsr' to find the emails I sent years ago with all the
details.

Granted, I don't know that they've demonstrated the software scaling
out to distributed notes *and* in to 100 laptops in a single room w/o
any manual tweaking.  They can best tell you about that themselves.

But OLSR is a much more appropriate and much less "pixie dust"
solution than 802.11s ever was/is/will be.

I think the primary challenge is social -- isn't it always?  The OLSRd
guys have to get passionate about making their stuff work on XOs, and
enough deployments have to be adventuresome (and desperate) enough to
give them a testbed to iron out all the kinks.

But I think it's a worthwhile "management" challenge for someone to
attempt.  Because what's needed is leadership, managing the resources,
linking person A to person B, driving it to release/ship, and a little
bit of inspiring the troops.  The technical challenges are much less
hard.

(And it's probably an "outside OLPC" project, at least initially,
because OLPC can't afford to devote any resources to it.)
  --scott

ps. technical challenges: making it bulletproof and brainless,
seamless scalability from lots of laptops in a tight space to a few
laptops spread out, and (eventually) processor-independent operation
on the marvel microcontroller to allow sustaining the mesh at very low
power levels.