Wireless Mesh Network based on cheap consumer routers

Question

I wanted to know if any such system already exists for the average open source user. With all of the net neutrality arguments around and with the cost of broadband likely to go up in the future. It seems like a good idea for a open source protocol which allows standard consumer routers to operate together and form a mesh network with other consumer routers close by. Likely possible that with enough nodes in a close enough proximity and a good abstraction we could get something good going.

Answer 1

You could always use WDS nodes (like a repeater, kinda).

I use it in my Buffalo AirStation with DD-WRT installed (any router that can load DD-WRT would work).

www.dd-wrt.com

Not sure on the scalability of it though. And the APs would have to be in reach of each other. They could run on separate SSIDs though.

Edit: here's the DD-WRT Wiki page about WDS: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WDS

Answer 2

WDS is not meant for and will not scale to more than a few nodes.

There has been extensive work on mesh routing protocols such as BATMAN-ADV, OLSR, BMX and 802.11s. These are all supported on OpenWRT which supports a very large number of consumer wireless routers

There are also many large scale deployments such as freifunk and deployments by The Village Telco

Answer 3

Just to add more info, batmand (layer 3) or batman-adv(layer 2) can run on almost anything with a resemblance of linux, I have managed to get it working on android devices (running cyanogenmod mostly), raspberry's, laptops, foneras, .... basically anything that has or allows a wireless card with ad-hoc mode and a linux-based operating system.

Answer 4

Freifunk Luebeck uses D-Link 300 with batman-adv