I Am a Techie is happy to announce a post series on Wifi Mesh Networking. In the coming weeks we will be testing some of the major mesh firmwares and supporting software’s.

Wifi mesh networks consists of a collection of wireless routers which work together to provide wireless access to client devices. The mesh routers route packets from one router to another in order to reach destination. One of the major factor that helps us classify the routers available is the algorithm used for routing. Here is a simple wifi mesh network diagram.

Mainly two firmware are popular for mesh networking, meraki, and open mesh of which open mesh is best suitable for the time being mainly because of its cost.

By making an area wifi enabled will make you even call within the network free of cost using VOIP.

Subscribe to the RSS feed and wait while we uncover the mesh secrets.

The post series we are writing here is the resultant of wifi mesh network installations happening at Saidapet, Srinagar colony, Chennai. The mesh networks at Chennai is now up and running. We started load testing in the network and we will apply enhancements to the networks soon to boost signal strength and manage traffic.

The mesh products that I am planning to test out are

• Meraki
• Meshcom
• Open-Mesh

Meraki is a nice product and from my previous experiences with it, it has performed well. I myself have a meraki mesh running at my home. But their product is good only for the basic version. The version with more features are costly and their business plans are really sucks.

Meshcom provides firmwares for router manufacturers and operates in a different fashion compared to other mesh router companies. They are strong business wise and has got many tie ups in place. A few months back they had a windows mesh driver available on their site for free download. But now its not there. Now I am being asked to fill in a form. Anyways Ill look at it later.

Open-mesh is the Meraki killer. It offers as many features as the Meraki with a lesser cost. If meraki is windows, open-mesh is linux. Meraki kind of cheated its fans. I was a hard core meraki fan. But now Im an open-mesh fan. The hosted interface for configuring open-mesh routers is really good and more and more features are being added daily.

Before discussing in detail about Meraki and Meshcom, lets discuss about Open-Mesh. Its truly poor man’s wifi mesh networking product. As written on their site, the product is ideal for school/office campuses, hotels, apartments and towns. My first Open-Mesh network is successfully running in Chennai serving more than 10 users in an apartment complex.

The product comes with hardware routers and a hosted online interface to manage it. Routers cost 49$ a piece and if you buy 20 pieces together you will get it for 799$. The routers are very small with the size of a toilet soap.

The hosted dashboard is very simple to use and any one can create and deploy a network without anyone’s help. To add a node to a network, all that is required to do is to punch in its MAC id into the hosted admin interface. The system will find the router, next time its powered.

One major feature of open-mesh is that, it supports multiple internet gateways. When you have a mesh containing 20+ routers, you will definitely need to have multiple gateways on your network. This is to act as a fail safe arrangement and also for bandwidth distribution.

Iamatechie interviewed the open-mesh firmware developer Antonio Anselmi. We are publishing the summary to our readers.

1. What is your education/work Background?
I’m an IT Engineer and work as freelance System & Network admin, mainly on TCP/IP Linux platforms.

2. What is your role in the open-mesh project?
I’m the maintainer of the firmware

3. Can you say a few words about the team behind open-mesh?
We are a few team composed by people all around the world, other than me there are:
- Mike Burmensteir (from open-mesh.com) and Shaddi Hasan (from UNC Chapel Hil) working at Dashboard and at Orange Dashboard
- Marshal Dias (wifiCPA.com) is involved in the porting of coova-chilli
- Joe Bowser (VONI Vancouver) who merged his ruby-dashborad and wifidog captive portal solution
- Aaron Kaplan (OLSR team) is working to port OLSR into robin

4. What are your views on other mesh products like Meraki and MeshCom?
Currently Meraki has the best play in town: it’s a robust company with important collaborations with google, but we hope to grow in a few months. Meraki recently changed their politics with customers and “closed”
their device (look at their license agreement) so folk is very excited on our. Really don’t know MeshCom, I’m sorry.

5. If there was no open-mesh project, then what else would you be working on now?
IT stuff such as consulting, administration and so on…

6. What are the future plans for open-mesh?
Just in these days two big customers from Canada and UK have in plan to roll-out 10K nodes in this summer so our big goal is a stable release (beta-1.2) at the end of June: we all are working towards this direction.

We have solid contacts with Accton and this will allow us to have a better hardware (such as second integrated antenna, POE, GPS, Acton drivers,… ) in a month or two. We collaborate with Ubiquiti Networks too in order to release a pico-station with robin pre-flashed at the beginning of the summer (I’m waiting some samples from Ubiuiti to start tests).
About firmware we stay currently on top of Openwrt kamikaze 7.09 but other features are in plan according to new hardware (GPS first) and users requests… we are open!

Thanks

Antonio

The image shows the mesh layout on a google map. The nodes are numbered from 1 to 3. Node 3, which is in green color is powered up right now and the other two nodes are not powered. The nodes are setup in an apartment complex and provides wifi to 15 homes.

This shows the usage pattern and nodes that had problems in the recent past. 2 Nodes listed there were not powered and is marked in red to mean that they need attention.

Shows the network diagram and how the nodes are connected.

Shows the list of users who have connected to the mesh recently.

This is gonna an important topic What VOIP can do with WiFi mesh? I can say this is the topic which might be useful for saving your expense in local calls. If your city is already WiFi enabled just think of the situation where you don’t need to pay phone bills for local calls? I know you will be interested. If your city is WiFi enabled this dream can be setup without enough cost. But this is heavily dependent on your network. There are couple of requirements that need to be satisfied.

1) WiFi mesh
2) SIP server
3) SIP clients

Another main requirement is your bandwidth and its reliability. Make your WiFi mesh reliable for voice handling. Any packet loss in voice handling may disrupt its quality of service(QoS). Another major factor is its latency. IPERF is a measurement tool to find the QoS. This tool measures mainly node to node throughput, latencies, jitter, packet loss etc. If the QoS achieves certain level, we can deploy Voice solution with the existing WiFi mesh network. SIP server may be open source asterisk solutions or some Hardware capable to accept SIP protocols.

Now a days high end phones are equipped with WiFi chip. So we can install a SIP based application and use it in the existing mesh network for local voice call. I am planning to setup a asterisk based solution in one of our mesh network for testing purpose so that I can analyze the reliability.