1

I've been trying to setup a wifi mesh network, with no success. I've tried:

  • straight 802.11s - Didn't work at all
  • cjdns (Tomesh) - formed a mesh network, but unreliable, slow data rates
  • batman-adv - worked, but couldn't get the cell ID to remain static, which caused issues.

Has anyone actually gotten a reliable, good quality wifi mesh network working on raspberry pi? Any tips?

Davido
  • 131
  • 1
  • 5

1 Answers1

1

Answer your 1st query: For mesh, we need to check the capability of hardware(wifi chip) and its wlan driver. Wifi driver has to support that mesh point support. I hope in Raspberry Pi, it has Broadcom wifi driver i.e brcmfmac(broadcom fullmac). In fullmac there is no mac80211 implementation. MLME(MAC sub Layer Management Entity) is implemented in software i.e mac80211. Even 802.11s implementation is in mac80211. since you are using the Raspberry Pi which has brcmfmac driver, can't support 802.11s.

Could you please elaborate more on batman-adv? I mean how its working on Raspberry Pi ?

shaikh kamal
  • 11
  • 1
  • With batman-adv, as long as one device was already online and ready to go before the second device was turned on, they would form a mesh network. The problem came when the devices were turned on far away from each other then brought close, they wouldn't connect because they each had their own cell ID. In order to form a proper mesh network they needed to have the same cell ID, where instead they seemed to just make up their own cell IDs, even though I defined what it should be. Does that make sense? – Davido Oct 22 '18 at 14:13
  • @shaikh you just saved me a few hours. What would you recommend as a hardware software configuration for someone starting this? – Abe Petrillo Apr 28 '20 at 11:20