We are using both HWMP+ and MME in a dynamic wireless mesh configuration.

HWMP+ is used to join all the nodes together, some which have Internet connectivity and some which don't. When a node has Internet connectivity we change it's status to Mesh Portal, otherwise this is off.

Layer 2 meshing is working fine. But what is the Mesh Portal setting really doing? Is it supposed to tell systems to set up routes in any way? My understanding is that is indicates an endpoint in path calculation and should cause nodes that are not portals to address unknown MAC addresses to this portal for resolution. Correct?

Then MME is used for gateway broadcast. If a node has internet connectivity by either Ethernet or LTE modem, it will have gateway-class=>6-Mbit and gateway-selection=no-gateway. If it has not internet connectivity it will have a gateway-class=none and gateway-selection=best-statistic. With this we would expect every non-gateway node to seek out the best gateway, create a IPIP tunnel and give the tunnel a 0.0.0.0/0 route.

But what we are seeing is that the non-gateway nodes are selecting the node on the mesh with the connectivity performance (lowest packet loss seems to be the metric), regardless of whether the node is a gateway or not. If the node happens to be a gateway then a IPIP is created, but sometimes a default route for the IPIP is added and sometimes not.

Question 1: Is there a conflict with using HWMP+ and MME together?
Question 2: Why is the gateway of a node going to another node if it is not advertising itself as a gateway?
Question 3: Why would IPIP tunnel be created but no default route?
Question 4: Is there a better protocol or method to set default gateway on a mesh other than MME?

Gateway selection almost seems random and we have tried every possible configuration to correct it.

This did work under old versions of ROS like 6.04 but broke.

I am trying something similar where each node will have cell back haul and maybe satellite back haul. If the satellite back haul is available I want the unit to switch to that I also want a nearby unit that is using say 100% of its internal cellular resources to pull additional bandwidth from across the mesh. Let me know if you find any resolutions to your issues as I believe they may help with some on mine.

Thanks in advance
Brian