New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed

[C. Scott Ananian]

To clarify, there are at least seven different directions to follow here:
 a) telepathy-based collaboration on 802.11g networks
 b) telepathy-with-cerebro-backend collaboration on 802.11g networks
 c) cerebro-based collaboration in 802.11g networks.
 d) 802.11s meshing in dense networks
 e) 802.11s meshing in sparse (wide-area) networks
 f) 802.11s Mesh Portal Point functionality (bridging a school 802.11g
network to a neighborhood 802.11s network)
 g) OLSRd wide-area meshing on an 802.11g sparse (wide-area) network
 h) plain ol' 802.11g in 100+ node schools

Let me try to summarize current status on a few of these:
 a) what we're currently deploying.  believed working for ~20
machines, but there are problem reports from the field.
 b) collabora did some work to abstract out avahi, in theory the
groundwork is present for a cerebro backend.
 c) Poly has demonstrated this with 70 laptops (limited only by the
size of his testbed); would require modification of activities.
 d) nortel and our old mesh testbed looked at this, but I believe
Michalis' current opinion is that we should be using APs in this
scenario.  So, not important?
 e) No one looking at this.  Poly has proposed a testbed for this.
 f) yanni is looking at this?  No test bed yet.
 g) demonstrated in vienna, berlin, and athens with 600+, 800+, and
~2000 nodes.  Tradeoff: we can't route w/ CPU power turned off;
doesn't make progress towards getting 802.11s working for gen2,
probably requires further tuning for optimal performance in dense
networks.
 h) Ricardo looking at this?  No test bed that I know of. We know that
tweaks are required to get any 802.11x standard to work in a dense
scenario: media access protocols, probe request/response, beacon
tuning, etc.  Marvell's done some of this tuning already, but we don't
have any local resources validating/verifying behavior.

Which should we invest in?  Which should we invest in most heavily?
Let the politicking commence.
 --scott

-- 
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