Hi -

we, the B.A.T.M.A.N. development team are happy to release B.A.T.M.A.N.-III-0.2.0-beta. We are calling you to download ( http://open-mesh.net/batman/downloads ), update and test now!

Since our last release a lot of code has been (re-)written and intermediate code revisions have been tested in real-live deployments, keeping the responsible mesh-node administrators busy with updating, monitoring and writing bug reports. Many thanks to them and especially to Ludger Schmudde who (by constantly challenging the latest revision in an eight-node-16-interfaces-real-life setup) provided invaluable key-informations for finding the most hidden implementation and design bugs. Many sections in the implementation have also undergone improvements to reduce memory consumption and CPU-load like a new hash algorithm implemented by Simon Wunderlich.

Now we believe that version 0.2 will bring major improvements in performance, usability and stability. We think that our code base is - despite many changes since version 0.1.2 - reasonably stable now and has been thoroughly tested.

There is still no such thing like a configuration file... B.A.T.M.A.N. does not need much tweaking for different deployment situations. This means values for reasonable behavior of the algorithm are hard-coded in the B.A.T.M.A.N. daemon. Of course finding the best hard-coded values to optimize the behavior needs some playing with the algorithm.

Our last step before we release 0.2 will be to tweak the hard coded value of the 'bidirectional link checking' algorithm and test the results. Ranking and forwarding of B.A.T.M.A.N. packets is - of course - different if a link between neighbors is bidirectional or unidirectional. So far a link to a single-hop neighbor was considered bidirectional as long as at least one out of the recently self-initiated originator messages came back from this single-hop neighbor within the last *three* seconds. We are going to test the results if this bidirectional-check is made more strict. This release will consider a link as bidirectional as long as at least one of the self-initiated originator messages comes back from this single-hop neighbor within the last *two* seconds.

The B.A.T.M.A.N.-III algorithm does support asymmetrical routing *but* if the bidirectional link check algorithm is not strict enough it will prefer asymmetrical routes in the unfavorable direction. If the bidirectional link check is strict enough it will select routes similar to an ETX-like metrik.

*Important*

Since we are tweaking an important setting in the daemon's behavior we raised the compatibility value - so the new B.A.T.M.A.N.-version will ignore packets from older versions and vice versa. It is possible that we are performing further testing with even stricter values for bidirectional link checking. These versions will also have different compatibility values.

Be assured that we won't bother you with tests and updates without reason. The 0.2-release will be available soon.

We are calling you to download ( http://open-mesh.net/batman/downloads ), update and test now!

The easiest way for updating your openWrt/whiterussian based freifunk router is to issue an: # ipkg install http://downloads.open-mesh.net/batman/mips-whiterussian/batman_III-0.2.0b_mi... and restart. If are looking for a freifunk-based web interface (and have not already installed it) run: # ipkg install http://freifunk.schmudde.com/ipkg/freifunk-batman_0.83.ipk

happy testing the B.A.T.M.A.N. development team