sorry if I wasnt clear, ill explain in-line:
If i got your setup right, you plan to flash openwrt on all the nanostations that belong to the supernode, but install batman-adv only on the 'central' router, with a single eth nic. In that case, batman-adv has no (manual or automatic) way of alternating the different paths (or even knowing which packet came trough which radio).
ok, this is where I was unclear. You are correct that only the router that is part of the 'supernode' runs batman-adv (at least in the described scenario). I didn't know if batman-adv was tracking connections to each node or tracking interfaces.
You should use vlans for that (i'm not sure about the performance), or run batman-adv on each individual radio, including both the wlan and eth0 in bat0.
ok, this is an option I had considered, but I'm worried that link alternation wont be an option as the radios only have a single radio and the alternate path is through a completely different radio/device connected via ethernet.
As far as vlans are concerned, are you saying to have a vlan on the router for each attached picostation and then set the picostations ethernet interface to match that vlan? Then I can add all the vlans to bat0? Alternatively, some of my options for the router have enough ethernet ports to forgo the vlans.
This last choice will allow packets being relayed along the backbone to skip passing through every central router on hops. They would instead get switched directly between nanostations belonging to the same supernode (unless, of course, the packet's destination is indeed that 'central' router)
sure, but by hoping through individual nanostations, the packets are going to take a single channel. Then the second link between nodes is really just failover, right?
maybe if you could clarify this for me. for link alternating, do the two nodes need to be one hop neighbors?
according to docs, link alternating works in this scenario, where both links are good: node1_Link1------------node2_Link1 node1_Link2------------node2_Link2
but what about this: node1_Link1------node3_Link1------node2_Link1 node1_Link2------node4_Link2------node2_Link2
will node1 and node2 still have link alternation? This is basically what the central router + picostations with the picostations running batman-adv would look like
supernode1-------picostation1---------picostation1--------supernode2 supernode1-------picostation2---------picostation2--------supernode2
so supernode2 is then a 3 hop neighbor to supernode1. So will link alternation work here? Lets just say that supernode1 has the backhaul and supernode2 has nothing except it's link to supernode1. Ideally, SN2 gets the faster, dual link connection to SN1. If not, then back to the dedicated ports/vlan option
supernode1-bat0-vlan1-----vlan1-picostation1---------picostation1-vlan1-----vlan1-bat0-supernode2 supernode1-bat0-vlan2-----vlan2-picostation2---------picostation2-vlan2-----vlan2-bat0-supernode2 (vlan1 and vlan2 are interchangable with eth1 and eth2 in this example)
now SN1 sees SN2 is a single hop neighbor, and then I would expect that link alternating would work.
in the scenario with dedicated ethernet ports or vlans are used to connect the picostations, the supernode acts like a single device as far as the mesh is concerned in the scenario where the picostations run batman-adv as well as the router (which might just be a switch at that point) then the supernode is just a node cluster where ethernet is the L2 transport instead of adhoc wireless.