mesh portal discovery

[david at lang.hm]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, John Watlington wrote:

>> I completely fail to see why we need the DHCP server to get the IP
>> address
>> of the nearest MPP or get the optimal path to and from it.
>
> The MPP discovery mechanism originally proposed worked great for getting
> packets out of the mesh through the shortest path.   The problem was
> that
> outside of running NAT on each MPP, there wasn't a good way to ensure
> that packets sent to that laptop entered the mesh through the same MPP.
>
> That is currently handled (in IPv4) by using a different DHCP range
> for each
> MPP, and routing to the appropriate MPP based on those ranges.

this sounds like the mobile IP problem.

could you do something along the lines of having the MPP boxes within a 
mesh talk to each other (either over the mesh or over the Internet) so 
that they know what boxes are closest to each one.

then have the mesh route the traffic out to the nearest MPP.

response traffic would go to the MPP that allocated the IP address, and 
that box then tunnels the packet over to the MPP box closest to the laptop 
(similar to how LVS does load balancing), and that box then sends it over 
the radio.

David Lang