Hello people,
as most of you may already know, last summer I've been working on the
B.A.T.M.A.N.-Adv GSoC project named "DAT: Distributed ARP Table". For who wants
to get deeper into the details of the project there are two links:
- The GSoC proposal [1]
- The DAT wikipage on
open-mesh.org [2], with status and ideas description
Just to recap: DAT is a distributes hash table meant to store ARP entries for
fast lookup. In a normal scenario, whenever a node wants to communicate with
another one, it first needs to issue a broadcast ARP request in order to
retrieve its PHY/MAC address. In a sparse network a broadcast message could be
lost several times before reaching the real destination so creating high
latencies. With DAT, every ARP entries (a pair [IP addr, MAC addr]) is stored on
a "computed" set of nodes, therefore in case of ARP request theses nodes can
directly be contacted (in unicast) and the needed information can be quickly
fetched.
Cheers,
Antonio
[1]
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/ordex/4001
[2]
http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/DAT