I'm considering a certain deployment model here and wanted to get some expert input.

The design would be -batman-adv router (could be raspberry pi, or pcengines, etc) -1,2,3 etc complete radio devices doing 802.11s or dynamic WDS etc with that radio interface bridged to an ethernet port connected to the batman-adv router.

This might be called 'radio on a stick'.

an example might be

2 mikrotik omnitik ac devices on different channels, each with their 5Ghz radio configured as ap-bridge with dynamic WDS, those WDS interfaces would be bridged with horizon (to eliminate loops) and 1 ethernet interface w/o horizon. Those interfaces would connect to the batman-adv router.

mikrotik has an hwmp based mesh, but it's primitive and I don't want nodes responding to other nodes in that mesh, I want batman-adv magic in the mix. I might utilize this interface but with a 1 hop limit so it works a lot like a horizon bridge without using horizon.

this design appears as ptp links plugged into a switch and has no opportunity for loops. Each batman-adv router can broadcast and each other batman-adv will receive that through the bridge because it doesn't have horizon set, but the A and C devices that are 'bridged' by B can't because those interfaces share horizon on B, or the hop limit depending on the interface used. I'm thinking that solves any issues batman-adv might have with putting the 'switch/hub' of sorts in the middle.

One thing I'm trying to solve here is the classic single radio mesh issue of halves bandwidth, as well as having link health in the mix without taking an interface offline. I'd rather have 2% packet loss on an interface that have 100% packet loss.

additionally, this is for a hybrid mesh design where there is a ~50 node mesh with 2-3 backhauls to a mesh entry point on a tower, and then likely a 'midspan' link or two with high capacity radios to reduce hop count.

finally, this allows me to use off-the-shelf devices with pole mounts etc for this while running the batman-adv router on the ground in an appropriate container. A raspberry pi4 would be a great router for this and I could use VLANs up the feed ethernet link.

Thoughts?