Salut and Suspend/Resume issues

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 12:29 -0500, Giannis Galanis wrote:
> The avahi works is that every several minutes(a predetermined timeout)
> each host will send multicast request for all peers in its list.
> Then all peers receiving this request will send a multicast reply.
> 
> The packets are multicast because the mesh is mobile/dynamic so we
> dont know where the target is, or which is the ideal route

The problem is that with a timeout of T minutes and N laptops, there is
a wakeup required every T/N minutes, on average?  Based on your
description, it sounds as if this could be fixed by a small change in
Avahi's timeout behavior.  

If I reach the timeout, I send a broadcast saying "Everyone, what's your
status?".  In reply, all users send a broadcast "My status is X".  All
peers receive all of these broadcasts, and reset their timers to zero.
In this way, all laptops wake up together once every T minutes.

Surely the solution is not this simple...