Open-Mesh

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team is delighted to announce its latest release - batman-adv 2013.2.0 - introducing a complete new submodule for optimized packet transport, new features and our regular set of bugfixes. As the kernel module always depends on the Linux kernel it was compiled against, it does not make sense to provide binaries on our website. As usual, you will find the signed tarballs in our download section:

https://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/releases/batman-adv-2013.2.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.

Thanks¶

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

• Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
• Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
• Martin Hundebøll <martin@hundeboll.net>
• Matthias Schiffer <mschiffer@universe-factory.net>
• Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@oracle.com>
• Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
• Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>

and to all those that supported us with good advice or rigorous testing:

• Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
• Peter Senna Tschudin <peter.senna@gmail.com>

batman-adv¶

The highlight of this release certainly is the newly added network coding support. Network Coding aims to improve transmission efficiency to preserve precious air time. The principle behind network coding builds upon wireless being a shared medium and exploiting this fact to our advantage (given that the situation allows to do so). The increased efficiency is achieved by combining two packets into a single transmission that is received by 2 destinations at the same time (due to the aforementioned shared medium characteristics). Tests have shown an increase in performance of up to 60% due to this clever mechanism. Exhaustive documentation has been made available for the curious reader explaining every detail regarding configuration, implementation and future work.

Henceforward, batman-adv interfaces can be configured via the rtnl interface configuration API in addition to the known sysfs API. The rtnl API offers a generic approach to configure all modern Linux interfaces which is used by utilities like 'ip'. As part of the interface API restructuring batman-adv also gained the ability to automatically resolve duplicate interface usage. For example, adding an interface to batman-adv while the interface still is part of a bridge will now result in the removal of the interface from the bridge without manual intervention. The identification of own mac addresses in multi-meshes setups (multiple batX interfaces on the same host) has been fixed and a necessary length check when parsing OGMs has been added.

batctl¶

To complement the network coding submodule a variety of new features went into batctl. It is now possible to enable/disable the network coding at runtime via a new commandline switch. Furthermore, batctl is able to print the network coding neighbor table and allows to configure the network coding log level for advanced debugging.
The minimal unicast 4addr dissector had incorrect size expectations which was fixed. The 4addr dissector learned to print the unicast 4addr subtype in order to facilitate keeping the individual 4addr types apart.

Happy routing,

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team