[Commotion-dev] Throughput advantage to 802.11s support

[Jeremy Lakeman]

On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 4:17 AM, L. Aaron Kaplan <aaron at lo-res.org> wrote:
> That's partly correct today. Initially the node_id field was 5 bit long -> hence allowed for a maximum of 32 nodes.
> I was told cozybit changed that in the mean time (are they then standard conforming?)
>
> What I was told behind the scenes: it was not a telco lobbyist, but actually the companies involved in standardising 802.11s themselves, which did not want it to be much of a success since all of them already had their proprietary protocol implementation :(
> I have no idea if this was a mere opinion of this IEEE forum participant or if it really reflected the situation at the IEEE at that time. However, it would explain brain dead ideas like a "32 bits are enough".
>
> Do you remember the 802.11s implementation at OLPC? That was terrible...they had to revert to fixed APs.
>
>>  However, Antonio of the Robin Mesh project, who has already incorporated 802.11s into this new Meshroot firmware stack, mentioned how this limitation is actually 50 nodes as implemented (??),
>
> ... in any case... is 50 nodes much better than 32 nodes?
> Not really. Come one :)
>
> I'd like to see an 802.11s network with > 1000 nodes!
> (Probably will never exist since it is one single collision domain).
> To sum it up: I am very doubtful of its scalability.
>
> For small, local layer 2 meshes it might be OK after it got lots of massaging from cozybit - don't know.
> We could test it at the WBM in Denmark.
> Try it out and tell us about it :)
>
> a.

Besides I'd like to see a mesh network that works on more than one
channel, with links that use different physical layers.