With the current client announcement implementation, in case of roaming,
an update is triggered on the new AP serving the client. At that point
the new information is spread around by means of the OGM broadcasting
mechanism. Until this operations is not executed, no node is able to
correctly route traffic towards the client. This obviously causes packet
drops and introduces a delay in the time needed by the client to recover
its connections.
A new packet type called ROAMING_ADVERTISEMENT is added to account this
issue.
This message is sent in case of roaming from the new AP serving the
client to the old one and will contain the client MAC address. In this
way an out-of-OGM update is immediately committed, so that the old node
can update its global translation table. Traffic reaching this node will
then be redirected to the correct destination utilising the fresher
information. Thus reducing the packet drops and the connection recovery
delay.
Signed-off-by: Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
The client announcement mechanism informs every mesh node in the network
of any connected non-mesh client, in order to find the path towards that
client from any given point in the mesh.
The old implementation was based on the simple idea of appending a data
buffer to each OGM containing all the client MAC addresses the node is
serving. All other nodes can populate their global translation tables
(table which links client MAC addresses to node addresses) using this
MAC address buffer and linking it to the node's address contained in the
OGM. A node that wants to contact a client has to lookup the node the
client is connected to and its address in the global translation table.
It is easy to understand that this implementation suffers from several
issues:
- big overhead (each and every OGM contains the entire list of
connected clients)
- high latencies for client route updates due to long OGM trip time and
OGM losses
The new implementation addresses these issues by appending client
changes (new client joined or a client left) to the OGM instead of
filling it with all the client addresses each time. In this way nodes
can modify their global tables by means of "updates", thus reducing the
overhead within the OGMs.
To keep the entire network in sync each node maintains a translation
table version number (ttvn) and a translation table checksum. These
values are spread with the OGM to allow all the network participants to
determine whether or not they need to update their translation table
information.
When a translation table lookup is performed in order to send a packet
to a client attached to another node, the destination's ttvn is added to
the payload packet. Forwarding nodes can compare the packet's ttvn with
their destination's ttvn (this node could have a fresher information
than the source) and re-route the packet if necessary. This greatly
reduces the packet loss of clients roaming from one AP to the next.
Signed-off-by: Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
Signed-off-by: Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
char was used in different places to store information without really
using the characteristics of that data type or by ignoring the fact that
char has not a well defined signedness.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
The definition NO_FLAGS was introduced to make the code more
readable and shall be used to initialize flag fields.
Signed-off-by: Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
CodingStyle "Chapter 12: Macros, Enums and RTL" recommends to use enums
for several related constants. Internal states can be used without
defining the actual value, but all values which are visible to the
outside must be defined as before. Normal values are assigned as usual
and flags are defined by shifts of a bit.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
seq_before and seq_after depend on the fact that both sequence numbers
have the same type and thus the same bitwidth. We can ensure that by
compile time checking using a compare between the pointer to the
temporary buffers which were created using the typeof of both
parameters. For example gcc would create a warning like
"warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast".
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
smallest_signed_int(), seq_before() and seq_after() are very useful
functions that help to handle comparisons between sequence numbers.
However they were only defined in vis.c. With this patch every
batman-adv function will be able to use them.
Signed-off-by: Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
batman-adv uses pointers which are marked as const and should not
violate that type qualifier by passing it to functions which force a
cast to the non-const version.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
It is slightly irritating that comments after a long line span over
multiple lines without any code. It is easier to put them before the
actual code and reduce the number of lines which the eye has to read.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
To be coherent, all the functions/variables/constants have been renamed
to the TranslationTable style
Signed-off-by: Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
atomic_dec_not_zero() is very useful and it is currently defined
multiple times. So it is possible to move it in main.h
Signed-off-by: Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
Batman-adv works with "hard interfaces" as well as "soft interfaces".
The new name should better make clear which kind of interfaces this
list stores.
Signed-off-by: Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
Linux 2.6.21 defines different macros for __attribute__ which are also
used inside batman-adv. The next version of checkpatch.pl warns about
the usage of __attribute__((packed))).
Linux 2.6.33 defines an extra macro __always_unused which is used to
assist source code analyzers and can be used to removed the last
existing __attribute__ inside the source code.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking) is a routing
protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks. The networks may be wired or
wireless. See http://www.open-mesh.org/ for more information and user space
tools.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Antonio Quartulli