[Ns-developers] 802.11s code review

[Pavel Boyko]

  Gustavo, 

On Monday 16 March 2009 19:07:25 Gustavo Carneiro wrote:
> I am still no following.  I thought a .11s MAC layer would have its own
> private instance of a routing agent.  Why would you have one routing agent
> managing more than one .11s card?  Is that described in the .11s draft, or
> any other standard?

No, unfortunately 11s draft doesn't describe coordinated operation of the 
several wireless interfaces on the single mesh point. However, single 
interface mesh points don't look promising for our needs, you can find some 
very basic discussion even here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wireless_mesh_networking 

So we have decided to extend 11s draft model from the very start. One can 
obviously use single interface configuration in your simulation if you wish to 
exactly follow 11s. 

The way we propose to model multi-interface mesh point is really very similar 
to 'plain' bridging. The main difference is that our virtual mesh point device 
can (and do) _change_ packets it forwards from/to its interfaces, e.g. adding 
routing information. We don't subclass (and even use) BridgeNetDevice for this 
reason (using, however, BridgeChannel class). 

  Regards, 
  Pavel