[CUWiN-Dev] next few months' development agenda

[David Young]

I want to let people know of some needs that CUWiN has to meet with
new development, top priority first:

        hslsd performance optimization: on slow computers like our
            net4526's, hslsd can fall behind in its processing of LSUs
            and Hellos, so that it does not track topology changes as
            quickly as they happen.  Profiling shows that hslsd spends
            most of its time in just a few functions.  Some of those
            functions are not the functions I expect, and I see some
            opportunities for optimization.

        jitter HSLS Hello & LSU packet transmission: we need to jitter
            packet transmissions to avoid packet losses due to
            synchronization and interference.  I have laid the groundwork,
            which includes hitime (a high-res timer library using Niels
            Provos' event library and POSIX timers) and reference-counted
            HSLS transmit buffers (hsls_txbuf).

        gateway protocol implementation: Mike Earnhart and I are working
            to get his work onto our routers

        NodeConfig widgets for static (default) route: in Homer,
            we had to set a static default route.  CUWiN and our clients
            will need to do that again.  It ought to be configurable
            through NodeConfig.

        improved routing metrics: it is about time that we moved from
            ETX to ETT.  Also, we need to start measuring the quality
            of paths from gateway to gateway on the Internet, so that
            CUWiN routers can choose intelligently between wireless and
            Internet paths.  I won't break it down here, but I think
	    this is a three-step process.

I have in mind some other, long-term projects that I will describe later.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933