Hi,
I have been playing with batman-adv on the Mesh-Potato, and I will come up with a batman-adv based version of the MP firmware.
cool!
However I have seen interesting new challenges. For example, if the MPs just get their IP configuration from a DHCP server this eliminates the process of configuring an IP for each device. That is cool. On the other hand, not knowing which IP is assigned to which device introduces new problems. It makes debugging radio problems and hardware issues much harder in the field. So picking up a phone and punching in a static IP via the keypad for each device is not all bad, if you just want to be able to call one MP from the other by dialling the last octet of its IP.
I don't really understand where you see the "new" challenges. If you require static IP addresses you can deal with that in the same way you did without batman-adv. You could configure alias interfaces, calculate an IP out of the MAC or even use DHCP to assign always the same IP address to a certain client. How your setup looks like very much depends on your requirements.
Is there a special way of handling IPv4 ARP packets in batman-adv? I figure ARP must be much more robust in a Layer 3 mesh.
There is no special handling yet (expect for the ARQ mechanism for all broadcast packets). I also suspect that ARP requires some more attention but nobody has done that so far.
Cheers, Marek