frottle: Defeating the Wireless Hidden Node Problem 121
jasonjordan writes "The West Australian FreeNet Group was the first to go War Flying - and now we've released "frottle" (freenet throttle) - an open source project to control & manage traffic on fixed wireless networks. Such control eliminates the common hidden-node effect even on large scale wireless networks.
frottle works by scheduling client traffic by using a master node to co-ordinate - effectively eliminating collisions!
Developed and tested on the large community wireless network of WaFreeNet, We've found it has given us a significant improvement in network usability and throughput.
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Re:Good news. (Score:3, Insightful)
You could achieve the same thing on packet radio by using a digipeater instead of having all nodes transmit/receive on the same frequency, and I think you'd get better thruput with a digipeater than using Frottle.
Attention Project Namers: (Score:4, Insightful)
It's much worse than Firebird.
If nothing else, realize that it messes up people who search for you on Google because of all the @freenet.com email addresses.
token-passing on top of CDCSMA (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps this will stimulate some hardware vendor to make token-passing wireless network hardware to eliminate the latency problems. IBM, Madge and Thomas Conrad must have boatloads of relevant expertise already....
AODV (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just read the article.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Color me unimpressed.
Why are you critical of the solution? It appears to work well and is inexpensive. What is wrong with that?
A friend who used to work for a "baby bell" was involved with a project to provide VoIP and video services, as well as internet, over their DSL infrastructure. The problem that they ran into was that IP, as supported by their commodity DSL equipment, did not support QoS. Their solution was to tunnel a more advanced network protocol (ATM I think) over the entire DSL IP connection. Then they ran their voice and video over ATM directly and ran IP as another tunnel over ATM. It wasn't elegant, but it was cheaper and more effective than manufacturing new devices.
Anytime you can use commodity off-the-shelf hardware, you can usually save money.
Re:TokenRing? (Score:5, Insightful)