New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 8 Jun 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> 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

one more (which may be considered a varient of d)
i) 802.11s meshing in bad RF environments

this is where there are a small number of XO machines (so you don't have 
the 802.11s traffic issues), but where there are a large number of other 
802.11 devices in the area

a unofficial testbed for this would be to take a half dozen XO machines to 
a tech conference and try to run them.

David Lang


> 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
>
>