Difference between revisions of "Mesh/Technical Overview"

(→‎The three wifi networks and IP assignment: Updating to reflect current network topology)
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The home nodes run the full sudowrt firmware and on its own a bunch of home nodes will make up a fine mesh network. The home node is a normal five-ethernet-port indoor wifi router. An extender node runs a minimal firmware and does nothing on its own. Instead, the extender node basically acts as extra radios when plugged in to a home node. The node operator can put a home node in e.g. their living room and if they later decide they want a high speed directional link to a neighbour then they can put e.g. a Nanobridge M5 running the extender node firmware on their roof and connect it via ethernet to the home node. Or they could put a Nanostation M2 pointed out their window and extend the signal further out into the street or to nearby neighbours. Each extender node extends all three networks (explained in the next section).
The home nodes run the full sudowrt firmware and on its own a bunch of home nodes will make up a fine mesh network. The home node is a normal five-ethernet-port indoor wifi router. An extender node runs a minimal firmware and does nothing on its own. Instead, the extender node basically acts as extra radios when plugged in to a home node. The node operator can put a home node in e.g. their living room and if they later decide they want a high speed directional link to a neighbour then they can put e.g. a Nanobridge M5 running the extender node firmware on their roof and connect it via ethernet to the home node. Or they could put a Nanostation M2 pointed out their window and extend the signal further out into the street or to nearby neighbours. Each extender node extends all three networks (explained in the next section).


For home nodes we are currently only officially supporting the [http://www.tp-link.us/products/details/cat-9_TL-WDR3600.html TP-Link TL-WDR3600]. We are not planning to support anything else for the time being, though if you have a good reason please let us know. For extender nodes we are currently supporting
For home nodes we are currently only officially supporting the [http://www.tp-link.us/products/details/cat-9_TL-WDR3600.html TP-Link TL-WDR3600]. We are not planning to support anything else for the time being, though if you have a good reason please let us know. For extender nodes we are currently supporting the Ubiquiti Nanobridge M series and the Ubiquiti Nanostation M series.


The mesh is made up mostly of wifi routers using Atheros chipsets and running [https://github.com/sudomesh/sudowrt-firmware our own firmware] based on [http://openwrt.org/ OpenWRT], [http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~jch/software/babel/ Babel] and wlan slovenja's [https://github.com/sudomesh/tunneldigger tunneldigger].  
The mesh is made up mostly of wifi routers using Atheros chipsets and running [https://github.com/sudomesh/sudowrt-firmware our own firmware] based on [http://openwrt.org/ OpenWRT], [http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~jch/software/babel/ Babel] and wlan slovenja's [https://github.com/sudomesh/tunneldigger tunneldigger].