I have an interesting hardware setup I'd like to explore.
Basically, I would like to take commodity ubiquiti and/or openmesh hardware and build a mesh with two different node types, some having just 1 radio and others having multiple radios, a standard node and a super node.
the standard node is: a picostation flashed to openwrt running batman-adv and running the radio in Ad-Hoc mode. Alternately an OM2P flashed to openwrt. This is the basic client radio
the super node is: a group of picostations or nanostations, flashed openwrt in adhoc mode, but acting only as the L2 transport with a router at the center running batman-adv.
The idea is that the super nodes have multiple radios in multiple channels and can take advantage of link alternation allowing super nodes to keep much higher bandwidth between them while the standard nodes are cheap. The 'router' MIGHT also have a radio for client access (unifi station flashed to openwrt maybe, or an ALIX board)
The supernode will have more CPU and also be the target of backhaul/shorthaul links to cut down on hop count. The main router would also be a batman-adv device, probably an x86 server, and would be the border router for the mesh.
some questions, I know that the supernodes will have higher throughput capabilities due to dual mesh radios, but how will batman-adv know this or how would I tell it? Is the internal mechanism for determining the best path going to take this into account? Is there a way to identify a supernode as being a better path above and beyond the automatic batman-adv mechanisms?
Is having separate radios connected to a batman-adv router going to behave how I presume? That multiple node2node connections will be identified and the links be alternated when appropriate?
If the supernodes have 2 mesh radios, 1 in 5Ghz and 1 in 2.4Ghz, then the standard nodes will only be able to connect to the 2.4Ghz channel which might make it inappropriate to do link alternating on these two links because of the shared traffic. Should batman-adv automatically stop alternating the tx/rx on these links when one of the channels starts to get saturated?
some other info: the supernodes may have a link directly to the main distribution point, but may also be linked just to another supernode and not to the main distribution point, or possibly both.
the supernodes are likely to have more than 2 mesh radios as some of these could be direction antennas. A supernode might have 3x 2.4Ghz radios for mesh, 2x 5Ghz radios for mesh, and a 2.4Ghz radio for non-mesh clients. These would most likely all be connected to a switch port and only be on a single ethernet interface as far as batman-adv is concerned.