[Commotion-dev] Roaming between nodes

[Mikael "MMN-o" Nordfeldth]

Hi folks who are probably better at me with the black magic of wifi
networks. Not sure whether to post this here to -dev or to -discuss.

I'm curious whether there has been given any thought to roaming between
commotion wireless nodes. I.e. moving from one node to another without
dropping a connection. What would be necessary to enable this and is it
even desirable?

Roaming, I assume, requires a coordinated backbone. This I guess is hard
to impossible to setup in a reliable manner within an open mesh network.
As it is now, every router has its own subnet with NATing and a routing
table, right? This feels natural in an IPv4 network, given the rather
limited address space for unique, routable addresses. So to enable
roaming in the current Commotion environment, one would have to have a
backbone that tracks the connections. Which seems like an unnecessarily
complex thing to do in an open mesh.

With a larger address space (say IPv6) I suppose this would be easier,
as routing of packets between nodes could appear to be on the same
subnet. There'd be retransmissions in TCP of course, but the server my
local client is talking to would always see the same client IP (my IP)
and thus the connection might be laggy but not break at a node-hop.

Of course one would get external connections killed if the gateway
disappears, but internal connections (local applications etc.) would
still function.

So, again, is roaming possible, doable and desirable or not? Or, as it
may be, have I failed to understand some important part of IP routing?

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