Hello Eric,
the basic idea of meshing in general is: the destination nodes are probably not in the coverage area of your radio, but you still want to talk to these nodes. For example, imagine a city network where all nodes are connected to each other: You wifi cards signal is only strong enough for the next "neighbor", so you pass the traffic to the next neighbor, which will foward it again until it has reached your destination.
This means you don't "see" all nodes in a network, and you need a mesh routing program like batman to discover other nodes and find correct routes to them via other nodes.
If you have all nodes in one little room, you don't need a routing daemon, of course. :)
best regards, Simon
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 04:30:51PM -0500, Conner, Eric wrote:
I am new to ad-hoc mobile networking, and have a few questions. I am just a little confused as to where batman fits in. Why do I need an active network to attach the batmand to? If I'm in a network can't I see all the other nodes already? What is batman buying for me if I have to create my own ad-hoc network? If I don't have to create my own ad-hoc network, how do I set up my linux boxes so that they have an active network that will discover the nodes and allow the batmand to run?
Thanks for your help Eric
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