Network association algorithm

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 23:04 +1000, James Cameron wrote:
> On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 08:09:32AM -0400, Michail Bletsas wrote:
> > The radios already do power control automatically in Infrastructure
> > mode,
> 
> Agreed, my tests with detuned AM broadcast radios close to the left-hand
> antenna show a marked change in cross-band interference products when
> a laptop in infrastructure mode is closer to an access point or peer in
> ad-hoc.
> 
> > we need to confirm that this works in mesh mode too.
> 
> I suspect that it does.  I'm interested to know the real answer.

Not so sure, but we should figure out.  The issue with mesh mode is that
you don't have an AP sending beacons, so you don't know how loud you
have to talk to let the AP hear you.

> I just did a half hour test in mesh mode, with access point off, using
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details#Usage and found at least
> four distinct levels detected in this way, depending on the distance
> between two units, with one unit doing a "ping -f" of the other.  The
> thresholds between each level seemed to be logarithmic by distance ...
> in that there were more thresholds the closer the units got to each
> other.
> 
> In http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wireless_Driver_README there are no obvious
> signal to noise measurements for mesh mode.  Each SNR measurement
> specifically says it is for infrastructure.
>