Marek,
Woops! Forgot my own email subject! Silly me....
With regards to the type of middleware that I am searching for. Well, pub/sub with reliable and unreliable QoS is what we will most likely be using. I don't want to rush into a solution that buries the network in traffic from inter-broker communication, nor do I want to choose a middleware that fails in ad-hoc type networks. In any case, the middleware must hold up against repeated network partitioning and merging.
If we do use B.A.T.M.A.N we will likely be using the layer-2 flavor running on a router with openWRT. So drivers will not be an issue, just router selection.
I will be sure to share the tests if they occur!
Michael
On 15/03/2010, at 7:44 PM, Marek Lindner wrote:
Hi,
Well I don't remember mentioning MAGIC 2010, but you are correct, the project is MAGIC 2010. Good investigatory work! :)
the email's subject contained the necessary hints. ;-)
Furthermore, message passing may not necessarily be done with the use of a middleware. Realtime unreliable data such as GPS and telemetry information may simply be pushed onto the network in UDP packets. I would prefer to use a nice middleware that performs well in MANET environments and I am still evaluating the possibility of this. If you have any recommendations that would be good!
What exactly are you looking for ("middleware" is a pretty broad term) ? An application that can send GPS data through the network ?
Further on the topic of using BSS. We do expect wifi dead-spots and we must absolutely try to minimize these. So the multi-hop nature of something like B.A.T.M.A.N (i was hoping) would help in that regard.
Yes, batman can help you "extending" the network. But the biggest troublemaker will be the wifi driver because adhoc mode isn't that well supported. 99% of the users want infrastructure mode, therefore developers work on that first. Adhoc mode comes later (if at all), is often buggy and not well tested. The wifi communities get around this issue by focussing on hardware which either comes with an open driver (e.g. atheros chips) or have a working adhoc mode implementation. Depending on how much freedom of hardware choice you have I'd suggest you carefully pick your wifi chips.
I can't guarantee that we will use B.A.T.M.A.N but I will try to evaluate it in the field eventually.
Please, share the results of these tests with us. Even if you don't choose batman we would be very interested to find out what we can improve. :-)
Cheers, Marek