I've been watching this thread with great interest, having recently been
introduced to the possibilities of OLSR (net/olsrd) for local (and
beyond) P2P wi-mesh networks, and wondering if/how zeroconf fits in.
Some refs: My discovery point, a great (online) book found from a review
by Geoff Huston in the Internet Protocol Journal Vol 9 No 2, p44:
Wireless Networking in the Developing World: http://wndw.net/
OLSR.ORG: http://www.olsr.org/
RFC: http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt (basis, though olsrd extends this)
Host addresses in such a MANET appear to require manual allocation so
far, usually in RFC1918 ranges, but the notion of zeroconfig-joining
such a network seems perhaps worthy of exploration?
Am I way off base here, thinking some matchmaking might be useful?
This is all off the top of my head...
For a small enough mesh, with low enough latencies, I believe that you could
just define the entire mesh as one link, sharing a single instance if the Link
Local IP range. Everything acting as a router/bridge would have to propagate
the various LLA packets throughout the mesh but avoid sending them off-mesh.
OLSP or other ad-hoc routing protocols should handle that setup as well as if
every host had a static IP. (I don't remember the details of LLA, but I know
that mDNS needs multicast support. So you would need an ad-hoc routing
mechanism that supports multicast to get a full zeroconf mesh with DNS and
service discovery.)
But the design would start to break down as the mesh grows large enough to
either use a significant percentage of the LL address range or to make
end-to-end latency significant.
I can think of a couple of potential approaches to designing a federation of
smaller meshes; but they all have some pretty tricky issues to resolve.
I strongly suspect that it would be simpler to just build your mesh using IPv6
only; and to provide 6-to-4 (NAT?) conversion at the interfaces between the
mesh and the WAN. (The IPv6 address range is large enough that every interface
already has a globally unique link-local address; so no need to negotiate,
defend, or change the IP addresses as things move around.)
Also, I'm not familiar with OLSP; but I note that it apparently actively
discovers nodes one and two hops away. It isn't clear to me how it handles
routing to anything further than two hops. I also note that there are a
mind-boggling number of ad-hoc routing protocols to choose from...
-Pat
_______________________________________________
freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
