Hi Ladies and Gents,

I've built a three-node mesh network using cheap TP-Link TL-WDR3600 routers. They can do simultaneous 5.8GHz and 2.4GHz. I use the 5.8 for the backbone links between the nodes, and 2.4 to clients. The nodes are running OpenWRT and OLSRD.

This system mostly works well, but there are a couple of problems with it that I'm wondering if batman-adv would solve or make easier to solve:

1) The backbone links cannot be better protected than WEP, a limitation of OLSRD, 2) Gateway assignment is a manual process, which must be performed on every node in the mesh, referring to the single node connected to the WAN, 3) The manual gateway configuration of 2) prevents peer-to-peer communications between mesh clients, 4) Each node has its own /24 subnet. This causes problems when a device roams from one device's jurisdiction to another if the interface doesn't re-issue a DHCP request.

We're expanding the network, I've just bought another ten of these routers, and I'm going to spend some time assessing if batman-adv would be a better fit for our purposes. There will be a range of ios, android and windows devices connecting to the mesh.

My questions are as follows:

1) Does batman-adv worth with WPA2 or better encryption? 2) Must every client to a batman-adv mesh have a daemon installed? 3) Is it possible to separate different radio interfaces for different purposes? I.E. 5.8 for backbone, 2.4 for clients. 4) Can all nodes and clients on a mesh have an IP in the same subnet, solving some of the roaming problems caused by bad interface settings or drivers?

Thanks, Travis.