Hi,

I manage a campus network which runs a fibre backbone between critical points. I wish to impliment a wireless mesh to link non-critical points and "fill-the-gaps" so to speak. It is thus possible that more than one wireless point could act as a gateway to the main network. I understand that the B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol offers the most promising means of achieving this objective.

you can use meshing to build a chain of wireless routers covering a certain area. If you only have a single AP at the end of your fibre there is no need to mesh.

1: Do I have to use the Advanced version of B.A.T.M.A.N. to make this possible, of will the "standard" version work?

2: I have purchased a few WRT54GL-EU routers with which to test the implimentation. Are there any pre-compiled versions of the binaries available, or do I have to use a PC running Linux to compile my own binaries?

Both implementations can be used to build the mesh but it is a bit hard to give advice on which might be more suitable for your setup since we don't have much information regarding your requirements. The "standard" batman operates on layer 3 whereas advanced operates on layer 2 (each having its advantages & disadvantages).

Note: As batman-adv is a kernel module it heavily depends on the kernel version you run on the nodes. A linux not older than 2.6.20 is required. AFAIK the WRT54G still depends on the precompiled proprietary wifi driver only available for linux 2.4.20. OpenWRT tries to move to the open driver but I don't know how well it works.

Regards, Marek