Selecting a managed switch with Linux, for use in mesh network project (batman-adv)

Question

I am interested in trying out batman-adv to manage a mesh network comprised of point-to-point radios (mesh links) and cellular modems (gateways).

Each node would have one p2p radio, and some nodes would also have one cell modem. All nodes would also have a device that uses the network (small embedded device with ethernet interface), so in total there are three ethernet devices.

In order to keep the power and size foot print small, I want to stay away from using a computer with three nics, and I was wondering if there are routers (no need to be wireless, 802.11 won't be used) that would be suitable (linux, access to all ethernet interface, can support batman-adv)

For example, maybe routers that support dd-wrt can have batman-adv loaded and used in such a manner?

Answer 1

I'd like to point towards OpenWRT. While I don't know which hardware item would be best suited for your case, many of the not-too-low-spec'ed devices are supported by OpenWRT.

They've got a B.A.T.M.A.N. wiki page and I suspect batman-adv and batctl are prebuilt (i.e. installable via opkg install batman-adv).

The open-mesh.org people also give instructions for building it with OpenWRT.

Note that there are many projects and specialised forks in this area, better have a look around...