So I have been playing around with 802.11s on OpenWRT. I really like how it self heals and requires no cables. However, as far as I can tell OpenWRT is really the only way to build bigger 802.11s networks. I like how B.A.T.M.A.N. adv can keep track of connections and and routes so that the network is automatically build and optimized.
Is there a enterprise version of this that doesn’t require maintaining a bunch of devices? I am looking for a more premade solution where you deploy some nodes and connect a few to a wired connection. It should have self healing just like 802.11s.
Every enterprise wireless vendor has mesh or wireless uplink functionality available, however, none of them explicitly use 802.11s if you cared about the standard specifically. Meraki, Ruckus, and Unifi (on the edge between enterprise and non-enterprise) are ones that I can vouch for doing self-healing mesh with multihop. One difference with the vendor implementations is that a non-wired AP only connects to one uplink AP at a time, whereas I believe the 802.11s standard allows for a true multi-connected mesh.
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What is likely going to happen is that I end up deploying OpenWRT. It has tradeoffs but at the end of the day having something that can run on pretty much any hardware is handy. We have some old access points that can be reused anyway.
The mesh is just a backup solution for in case a line between buildings fails. It is a rare occurrence but when it happens it would be nice to have so sort of connectivity. It won’t be fast but it should be usable with degraded performance. With a 5Ghz signal it can push gigabit speeds with high latency. (In ideal conditions)