[Olsr-dev] OLSR on OLPC?

[C. Scott Ananian]

The OLPC XO-1 has really nice and spiffy 802.11s hardware.
Unfortunately, we're having some difficulty actually making it scale
properly in dense or high-traffic scenarios.  I'm interested in:

 a) consulting with you folks, who seem to have actual real-world
experience deploying large scale mesh networks,

 b) actually deploying olsrd as a fall-back mechanism on the XO --
giving up the power benefits of running 802.11s autonomously in the
wireless chip in exchange for perhaps better behavior in some
scenarios,

 c) finding out how well you are scaling these days: multiple hundreds of nodes?

 d) discovering your experience with OLSR in dense networks: if I put
100 machines in a single room running olsrd, does the network break
down due to discovery traffic?

 e) do you separate data and control traffic?  If not, do you have
problems with interference causing routing instabilities under high
traffic conditions?

  f) your thoughts on the OLSR extensions to the 802.11s standard: are
they worth implementing, or did you need to tweak the standard OLSR
protocol to make it work in real life?

 g) the media access protocol in standard 802.11 doesn't seem to scale
much past 30-or-so nodes wanting to talk at the same time.  Have you
run into this problem in dense deployments?

 h) there's some talk on the wiki about a new v2 rfc for olsr -- is
there some place I could look at the work in progress?  what
particular challenges does it aim to tackle?

Y'all seem to be doing great work, and I hope to start trying out
olsrd on the XO builds, which at the least would give us a way to give
non-XO-using developers a way to play with some of the mesh networking
features of our software.
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )