Libelium - Development

Configuring Wifi Mesh

The Wifi Mesh Interface enables dual band networks as it can be configured to work in the 2.4GHz or in the 5GHz in order to avoid interferences with common Wifi networks. The mesh protocol used is Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), an open source protocol which allows us to control if a certain node has to work as a fixed node or as a mobile one.

The antennas used are also dual band so you can change the frequency without changing the antennas attached to this radio.

Configuration

By default, when you buy Meshlium with the Wifi Mesh radio included it comes already configured to create the mesh network. This means that when you buy several Meshlium, one comes preconfigured with the "Mesh Gateway" preset and the rest with the normal "Mesh" preset.

Just connect the router labelled as GW to your ethernet connection and it will share the internet access to the rest of the neighbour nodes.

In order to distinguish between them they come with different ESSID's for the Wifi AP Interface. The GW has "Meshlium AP1" and the rest come with the form "Meshlium AP2" , "Meshlium AP3", etc.

If you want to do it manually:

To set a Mesh network you need several nodes with a Meshlium Mesh AP or Meshlium ZigBee Mesh AP preset and one with a Meshlium Mesh AP GW or Meshlium Mesh AP GPRS preset*.

* More info about the different roles in the "Presets" section

Once you have chosen the preset you only need to give a valid IP in order to get this node communicating with the rest of the brothers of the mesh network. The IP can be changed in the main section. Just set one IP which is not being used by any node and the current node will be able to join automatically to the mesh network. Just plug & mesh!

By default all the nodes with a Mesh preset come with the same ESSID and CELL ID. It is important all the nodes have this two fields with the same data. On the one hand the ESSID will allow the nodes to share a common ID in order to be detected as the same mesh network. On the other hand the CELL ID lets the nodes to act with a unique virtual MAC address, what facilitates the connections between the nodes in the network.

In the frequency field you can choose the band in which you want the mesh network to be created: 2.4GHz or 5GHz. As the antennas included for the Wifi Mesh radio are dual you don't need to change anything in the hardware configuration.

After saving the new options and once you have restarted Meshlium you have to validate the new configuration before the next 5 minutes, if not, the factory default configuration will be restored to avoid leaving Meshlium without connectivity. More info see the "Default Interfaces" section.

OLSR Options

In this section you can set if the current node is the GW of the mesh network. If you check the "Share Internet Connection" box it will offer its Internet connection to the rest of the brothers in the network. Remember that only one node in the mesh network can be working as GW.

The rest of the parameters allow us to change the time intervals used by the mesh daemon in order to send topology information to the neighbours.

The "Hellow Interval" and "Validity Time" set how often this node will be broadcasting information about its presence to the rest of the nodes "hello!".

The "TC Interval" and "Validity Time" set how often this node will be broadcasting information about its connections and topology to the rest of the nodes.

The "Hna Interval" and "Validity Time" set how often this node will be broadcasting that is sharing its Internet connection. This parameter is only used by the GW node.

In order to make this process easier we have created two different roles: fixed node and mobile node which can be set just pressing each button.

In the "OLSR Summary" section you can see direct information of the mesh daemon which is running inside Meshlium.

The Links/Topology section shows the direct brothers and the two hop neighbours along with the "next hop" node which will be accessed in order to reach these nodes.

The "Routes" shows what networks can be accessed regarding the information passed by the rest of the nodes. In the image below we can see as the node 10.10.11.1 is offering access to the Internet (0.0.0.0/0). This means this node (10.10.11.1) is acting as GW of the Mesh network.

The Gateway node

In a mesh network there is a node which shares its Internet connection to the rest of the neighbours. It is called the Gateway (GW).

There is only one GW in the mesh network and it has to be specified in the OLSR configuration (as pointed before) checking the "Share Internet Connection" option. You can also chose the Mesh Gateway Preset and change the Wifi Mesh IP to one not used in the network.

The Internet connection can be shared from the Ethernet cable or from the GPRS link. For this reason there are two kind of Mesh GW:

Meshlium Mesh AP GW -> from Ethernet
Meshlium Mesh GPRS AP -> from GPRS

For more information about how to change the roll of a Mesh node into a Mesh Gateway node go to the Presets section.

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