On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Andrew de Andrade <andrew.de.andrade@mac.com> wrote:

Hello all, I'm new to the BATMAN project and have only been following it a short while, but I was curious if any thought had been given to having B.A.T.M.A.N. use GPS data to aid in calculating best routes through a network.

i.e. once a node joins the mesh network, it not only broadcasts its presence and who it is connected to, but also it's physical location, assuming it has a GPS dongle connected to it.

The way I see it, only a few nodes in the network would need to be GPS capable to greatly increase the ability to calculate a route through the network.

Using response time to its closest neighbors, a node theoretically would only need to be connected to three other nodes the are GPS capable to triangulate its location. Once this node has triangulated its location it could then broadcast it to the rest of the network, thereby aiding other nodes figure out where they are located.

So long as each location-aware node is connected to at least 3 other nodes on average and assuming they are fairly evenly distributed, every node in the network with at least three links should be able to calculate it's location.

This location awareness plus congestion (node health) data would increase the efficiency of calculating the network topology at each node, and calculating the most efficient route to route the data.

Anyways, just an idea. As I said, I'm new here and will try to contribute where I can.

Andrew

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