Ad hoc wireless distribution service

Ad hoc Wireless Distribution Service (AWDS) is a layer 2 routing protocol to connect mobile ad hoc networks, sometimes called wireless mesh networks. It is based on a link-state routing protocol, similar to OLSR.

Principle of operation

AWDS uses a link-state routing protocol for organizing the network. In contrast to other implementations like OLSR it operates in layer 2. That means no IP addresses must be assigned because the unique MAC addresses of the WLAN hardware is used instead. Furthermore, all kinds of layer 3 protocols can be used, like IP, DHCP, IPv6, IPX, etc. The protocol daemon creates a virtual network interface, which can be used by the kernel like a typical LAN interface.

Alternatives

The ad hoc routing protocol list contains a large set of alternatives. However, most of them are academic and do not exist as practical implementations.

gollark: My guesses accidentally contained a proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic.

gollark: No, it's because I'm everyone's alt and I have an IQ of 205 octillion.

gollark: None are safe, broadly speaking.

gollark: Compute the main and variance then multiply and add until you get back to the definition of IQ.

gollark: You'd just rerun the statistics™.

External links

An implementation for Linux is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070504155750/http://awds.berlios.de/
Analysis of Mesh Architectures Why all mesh technologies are not created equal.
What is Third Generation Mesh? Review of three generation of mesh networking architectures.
Is Multi-radio mesh worthwhile? Cost and performance considerations of multi-radio mesh.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.