[Olsr-users] P2P chat

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> Markus and me have been talking about adding some kind of emergency chat 
> plugin to the master branch... we already have the necessary telnet/http 
> server there, should not be difficult.

Henning,

TCP/IP is a layered protocol suite.  If your chat application depends on
a particular routing protocol, you're doing something wrong.

Seriously wrong.

You should be aware designing a fully peer-to-peer protocol for chat is
really not difficult.  I've been having my third year students implement
just such a protocol, changing it slightly each year [1,2] to keep them
from copying.

Since that particular protocol is designed to be doable by an average
third year student in two months' time, it's deliberately kept simple.
In particular, it locates peers by using a simple increasing radius
search, rather than e.g. using a DHT.  (Note that naive increasing
radius, while horrible when compared to a DHT, is still way more
efficient than OLSR's flooding.)

(For what it's worth, I've also experimented with having some third
years implement a form of the Kademlia DHT protocol.  The conclusion is
that it's slightly too difficult for them -- Kademlia should really not
be attempted before fourth year.)

                                        Juliusz

[1] http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/enseignement/2008/reseaux/projet.pdf
[2] http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/enseignement/2009/reseaux/projet.pdf