[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-02-09)

[Chris Ball]

Hi Frank,

   > Has the following idea already come up?  How about just turning off
   > the wlan entirely during suspend, if the machine has reason to
   > believe that its contribution to mesh connectivity is negligible?

Michail should answer this, but it sounds to me like an interesting idea
with serious problems to overcome.  I don't know much about the workings
of the mesh, but here's one potential problem:  at school, each laptop
will believe its contribution is small.  If the laptops then all head
home with wireless off, they aren't transmitting the mesh beacons needed
for mesh discovery.  We would have to use timers to wake up the wireless
every so often and check for beacons, and hope that beacon broadcast
cycles overlap, and the mesh would clearly be degraded.

Given the current power draw seen by the module, though, my opinion
would be that the utility of having this (or something similar) working
makes it worth investigating even solutions that make the mesh slower
to respond.  (But my job is to get our battery to last longer, so of
course I'm going to say that.  :)

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>