>> Mikael, it is common practice to do air-to-air bridging on home networks >> now. We have discussed whether we want to support this in homenet, and >> concluded that we must. You are the first person as far as I can recall >> to suggest that this was optional. Yes, we do need a routing protocol >> that works well when some of the transit networks are wifi >> networks. This is not an edge case.
> Then we need to decide what kind of Wifi network we need to handle. > > Because if we're trying to support marginal performance mesh networks that > might change all the time, lose packets, drop multicast packets randomly, > etc, then those requirements need to be brought to the discussion. I think that the very minimum requirement is that adding a marginal link to a working network does not impact the performance of the previously working part of the network: I don't see myself explaining to my users why plugging in an extra wireless router in the attic causes their network to become unusable. Babel solves this particular issue by a combination of three mechanisms: (1) automatically assigning a high metric to a marginal link, (2) using hysteresis to avoid churn due to point 1 above, and (3) by ensuring that routing loops don't occur even if routing data is not propagated in a timely manner due to packet loss. I'm pretty sure somebody sufficiently smart could design a similar scheme for IS-IS, but be aware that it's somewhat more difficult to get right than you might expect. It took me a lot of experimentation to get the hysteresis algorithm just right, and I'm still working on improving the link quality algorithm. -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list homenet@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
