Hi Linus,
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This really answers my question, although one small confusion is why these 2 directories: /sys/kernel/debug/batman_adv/ and /sys/class/net/wlan0/batman_adv, are not present. I even upgraded to the latest 5.14 kernel on Raspberry Pi, unable to find.
Seems like 3 options can help eliminate wlan1 and use wlan0 for both protocol communication and real data communication: 1. Develop a client agent at wifi client side to encapsulate regular IP packets into batman protocol packets, but the agent need be ported into different OS, MAC, Windows, even IOS, Android. 2. Develop a server agent to intercept batman packets, and convert to regular ip packets. 3. Enhance batman kernel module to detect packet type, and support the use case natively. :-)
I'd like to do more research on it, and like to hear your suggestions on which option is better.
Best Regards Dwebf
On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 2:08 PM Linus Lüssing linus.luessing@c0d3.blue wrote:
Hi,
Glad to see that more and more people are experimenting with WiFi mesh networks.
On Fri, Nov 05, 2021 at 04:22:11PM -0700, Dweb Fan wrote:
Dear all,
Thanks for making such a great project!
I'm following the guide from https://github.com/binnes/WiFiMeshRaspberryPi, and setting up wifi mesh network on top of raspberry pi 3B+. Below steps are good now:
- batctl ping works (peer can ping each other through both IP and MAC address)
- mac os wifi client can discover the ad-host network, and join the network
This guide seems to set up two WiFi interfaces. wlan0 in ad-hoc mode and wlan1 in AP mode. wlan0 is a secondary interface of bat0 and wlan1+bat0 are bridged:
---br0---/ \ bat0 wlan1(ap) | wlan0(adhoc)
On wlan0 is supposed to be only used to interconnect batman-adv nodes. The batman-adv protocol is primarily spoken there.
Client traffic from your mac os wifi client is probably not able to speak the batman-adv protocol and is therefore supposed to go "over" bat0 instead of "under" bat0. So your mac os client should connect to the wlan1 AP interface.
The traffic is then bridged from wlan1 to bat0 and batman-adv will then encapsulate the client traffic. And then forward the *encapsulated* traffic on wlan0 automatically to the correct neighbor node.
Hope this helps.
Regards, Linus