Hi Andrew,
Do you have any performance analysis to show this is really helpful and not harmful?
I've seen indoor results where i had to reduce the hop penalty, otherwise BATMAN was taking a short path which worked badly. By reducing the hop penalty, so encouraging it to take more hops, i got usable routes.
I see the danger here this could break working networks, so maybe it needs justification?
as a matter of fact I do believe it is helpful. In various networks (more than a dozen) I have seen that batman would largely favor multi-hop routes, thus reducing the overall throughput. By setting it to a higher value I regained some of its performance. The networks are still up & running - I can show them to you if you are interested.
So, you had to reduce the default value of 10 to something even smaller ? A hop penalty of 10 results in a penatly of 4% per hop. A rough equivalent of 2 lost packets (62/64). Does not sound very much to me. Can you explain your test setup a little more ?
Nevertheless, this patch was intended to get a discussion going. The main problem I have been seeing in the last weeks is that OGM broadcasts have a hard time estimating the link quality / throughput on 11n devices. I'll also try to hack a proof of concept for an rssi influence on the routing and see if that has a better effect.
Regards, Marek