I know I’ve asked this before, but has anyone successfully been able to configure MT to be a routed Mesh system (2 SR5 backhaul radios, 1 SR2 rebroadcast)?
Now, with dual radios, WDS would not be as performance killing as it normally would be I would assume, but what would be the optimal configuration - AP for one, station WDS for the other - but then the station radio is stuck only connection to one other AP at a time - which for the most part is okay. It would of course only be able to connect to a live node, hopefully the strongest signal. That may not be the optimal path back to the main node however, so I don’t know if that’s the best solution.
That was one issue, the next is making sure it connects to a “live” node. Now with scripting I was thinking about the following. Disable the AP portion until it’s able to connect back to the primary IP address. After it comes up, randomly pick a rebroadcast frequency. If the netwatch detects the main node going offline (via a network failure), it would again disable the AP and search for another live node. Of course all the nodes would do this, so the nodes that are still connected (the closest) stay online, and the node that lost signal gets disconnected.
Of course this would have to incorporate some kind of routing or spanning tree at minimum to work properly and avoid loops (although turning off the AP when not connected avoids this to some degree since only “good” connections are available to connect to). I would imagine you could make this work bridged, but maybe OSPF could be better if an dynamic addressing scheme could be devised (DHCP-S on the APs, and DHCP-C on the clients, with an assigned subnet to each node). If I could make the backhaul portion of this routed, then I would use an EOIP tunnel to the main gateway for the SR2 client AP.
Any thoughts? I’m going to look around the office and see if I have enough radios and boards to build an experimental mesh system. The main reason is that I was looking at Skypilot mesh and was very excited about the ideas that are within it, I was thinking about the polling aspect and imagining this system using N-Streme with polling enabled for the backhaul system. I like dedicated backhauls, but I have enough towers & broadcasts in a small area that I would like to be able to add & expand coverage client by client rather than explicitly adding towers.