The answer to "millions of users" simply depends on the stability of those networks. It is perfectly possible to have different "BATMAN networks" and perform routing between those - that's what I stated in the answer to your first email.
Of course, those it is perfectly possible to set up obvious cases where BATMAN scales to "millions of users" - half of them are behind one BATMAN router, and the other half are behind another - then there are only two routing nodes, and very little work :P Of course, that might not be useful in practice... Seriously, I suggest you do some of your own reading into how BATMAN works, and how other mesh/P2P routing schemes work, and why they have different scalability profiles. From a scalability perspective, the interesting number isn't the number of users, but rather the number of nodes involved in routing decisions, and how mobile they are. In the most widely deployed networking schemes (current mobile phone networks), we have static network elements, with an explicit handover procedure between different stations for end-user equipment. End-user equipment under those schemes doesn't get involved in routing decisions - that's why it is not a mesh network (along with the fact that those towers typically have a very explicit idea of where they route calls & data sessions to).
Just go and type "mesh routing scalability" into Google Scholar and you should be much better informed on the subject.
Cheers,
Michael
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Kosta -- A Human Right kosta@ahumanright.org wrote:
Thanks for the response-
Can B.A.T.M.A.N. scale to millions of users? What are the limitations of B.A.T.M.A.N. in this regard? Where does it excel?
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Marek Lindner lindner_marek@yahoo.de wrote:
Hi,
We'd like to build a satellite network that serves as a backhaul to local de-centralized mesh networks. Local data transactions can move within the mesh, if data needs to be accessed from further away, they switch to the satellite network. An ambitious addition to this idea is to allow each device on the mesh to act as a piece of a phase array antenna.
I personally understand how challenging this may be, and my expertise is (very) limited. Is this technically possible with technology available today? What would you recommend to get this done and what can we expect in terms of an end user experience?
building decentralized local networks with a shared internet connection is the primary use case of batman today, therefore I don't really get your question. Can you provide specific info on what you have in mind ?
Cheers, Marek