Hi elekra,
Actually, I'm planning to conquer the world with a mesh network of B.A.T.M.A.N. robots and I'd like to know the exact protocol specification to achieve my goal of world dominance... :-)
Kidding aside, your website's claim of "unusable OLSR" made me very curious of B.A.T.M.A.N. and made me wonder about the specification (or fancy animation video!) without the need of examining the source code. But since you're still in the developing phase, I think I better wait a bit to see your final results. And then maybe it would be nice to post it as a draft to IETF too... in my opinion, your protocol might find a bigger public that way, and would not at all be kept in a drawer.
Keep up the great work! Dominik
Hello Dominik -
we have not submitted a draft to the IETF yet. Rather than writing drafts according to IETF style about ideas, we are spending time on improving the performance of our protocol by testing it in real life. Within 12 months of development we have left behind B.A.T.M.A.N.-I and B.A.T.M.A.N.-II. The successor of B.A.T.M.A.N.-III will be available in the near future - I'm sure it will give the protocol a good boost in performance. In my opinion the development cycle of many organizations is slow because they are too bureaucratic and too occupied with paperwork and their own hierarchical structure instead of developing useful things. I like the informal character of our development. Our research is a non-profit driven by fun and the will to empower people around the world to improve their communication on a grass root level. "On-line for all" is the agenda.
Of course hoity-toity people with ties, suits and long academic titles tend to ignore a work of freaky people that don't bother about writing texts in the style of codes of law. That's alright with me. In their fancy-looking presentations about mesh-networks you see soldiers, tanks and robots building a mesh on the battlefield or bugging devices for their paranoid big-brother fantasies. I don't want to be supportive for that kind of development. We can't avoid it because of the open nature of open-source development. We are not doing things for our drawers or to keep it as a secret.
Take the development of OLSR as an example. INRIA is still submitting new drafts about ideas that we have found not feasible in real life in the year 2004 when we did our first tests with 20 nodes on a conference (Wizard of OS III) in Berlin.
Of course our documentation can and will be improved. It would be nice if people find it easier to understand how B.A.T.M.A.N. works. But I think a animation movie with comments would be much more helpful than a text in the style of usual IETF documents.
I guess the development team will have no objections if someone is going to write a IETF-Draft about the final version of B.A.T.M.A.N.
We may write a draft of B.A.T.M.A.N.-IV as soon as it is properly implemented and thoroughly tested.
cu elektra
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