You know your stuff in-side out, hands down there is no argument about that :)
Getting back to your original quest... You are going to find the following:- The non-licensed wireless world is not as mature as the wire line world... think of today's wire less world being what the wire line world used to be about 10 -15 years back. Most of what you are citing from the Ethernet World, only became available and in common use in the last 10 years or so... before that, everyone was happy doing conversions from TDM ...(speaking loosely). In the wireless world of today, especially what folks here deal with, have some set outer boundaries ... a few of these are things like... performance, based on standard(s) , LOW COST, small in power consumption, etc etc... If you have a particular setup from the Wireline world in mind, you can always accomplish that by using wireline routers & switches and just use the wireless radios as bridges...Mikrotik is one on the very few mfg. which offers a whole line up of products, which can be mixed and matched to do routing / switching / with wired or wireless connections.. and a consistent OS... Having said that, hopefully you will realize that all of the so called "Wireless Radios" available in the marketplace are nothing more than a SBC, with a Wireless Radio (chip), a specialized Antenna (if integrated) and a customer OS.. most of the time is either based on Linux / BSD or the same base OS that is used for developing the Wireline routers / switches. Most of the secret sauce that we all get excited about tends to be in the 'software Driver' of the raw radio card or the Antenna...the rest of the routing / switching / mgmt stuff, folks either accept what came with that particular radio or use their own preferred router /switch to accomplish. A great example of that is what Ubiquiti is doing with their M Series... their 'Radio' are running linux (based on openwrt) their special sauce is their proprietary driver talking to the actual radio card, and their Antennas.. First set of products are based on 802.11n standard... covering 2.4Ghz & 5.XGhz... but there are planning to come up with radios running in 3.65 and (I am guessing here..) 900Mhz...running the same 'protocols' as 802.11n...... Actually seeing what 802.11n with Mimio antennas can do when compared to the traditional 802.11a/b/g... it is rather amazing. You can use their radios to do other stuff by modding the linux os they are running or simply using them just as a bridge, to connect your favorite routing / switching platform. BTW, Aaron Kaplan was trying to say, in not too many words.. that most of the "mesh" networks which have utilized the traditional Wireline protocols, (weather they are single frequency or not) have the usual problem .(most wireline protocols are not concerned with link quality...), and this is the reason why they developed the OSLR ... which takes link quality into account as well when making routing decision.. but you are not going to find OSLR in commercial radios.... not at the moment... If you look at all of the folks who are delivering successful mesh products, you will find them to be using 'proprietary' developed mechanisms to deal with the issues..e.g. Ruckus Wireless uses it's special antennas and a 'zone controller' to keep the Mesh radios in tip top shape, by dynamically adjusting all of the parameters on a real time basis.. As far as finding a multi-radio board... there are a few available best to see the link to Wili Box site that I had sent in an earlier email... they list out a number of mfg. for both the sbc's and the radios.. the question you will have to figure out is..on what part of the 'network design' ... 'ip routing ?' you will be willing to make a compromise on...and you still have not addressed the question of "Antennas"....:).... after using a good working 802.11n radios with MiMo Antennas... it is rather hard to go back to regular stuff... Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet& Telecom On 6/19/2010 8:50 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: > > This is one of the problems with any kind of "best efforts" routing > or bridging. Loss does accumulate. Of course it's the > single-frequency meshes where loss goes totally gaga. One of the > advantages of Carrier Ethernet with Q-in-Q is that CIRs can be > assigned to different points along the way, with reserved capacity, > so the near-in nodes don't hog everything. I don't think HWMPplus > does full CE, but it may have some tools to play with. If anybody > can suggest a better software load for a field-mountable multi-radio > processor, notably one that does MEF CE, I'm not wedded to > MicroTik. This is interim, after all; we hope to have our own code > at some point. > > On the Layer 2 v 3 thing, the distinction is artificial. Off the > shelf, LAN-oriented L2 switching does dumb bridging, based on an > assumption that it's all on-site with plenty of zero-cost orange hose > bandwidth to play with. So STP just avoids loops. IP itself is > really a layer 2 protocol too! This is non-obvious, but an IP > address names the interface, not the application or host, and thus it > is also a layer 2 address. TCP/IP doesn't even have a network layer, > just this stub that assigns two-to-three-level second names (IP > addresses to interfaces whose MAC address is totally flat. If you > assign node IDs in Layer 2, it becomes smarter than IP, and IP can > thus be run as a dumb stub protocol. > > (Suggested reading: Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to > Fundamentals, by John Day.) > > -- > Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com > ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ > +1 617 795 2701 > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
