Hardware platform

Hardware

We hesitated for a long time between:

1. one classical mini-PC: + no cross-compilation is required + easy to manage , -but more expensive, prone to failure – not in a small form factor
2. embedded appliances: + PoE + very small + adapted – cross-compilation – less extensible

Finally, we focused on the PC engine hardware (Alix3d2):

1. it supports Linux
2. 2 mini-PCI slots
3. compact flash
4. 1 Ethernet NIC
5. USB for wireless dongles
6. passive PoE
7. AMD Geode LX800 (5000GHz)

OS for wireless routers

We have the following choices:

1. Debian Voyage is (http://linux.voyage.hk) allows to execute a Linux on a small mesh router. It supports PC Engines ALIX/WRAP, Soekris 45xx/48xx;
2. Openwrt (http://openwrt.org) could be quite interesting since it can be executed on very small mesh routers (but these ones have only a very limited number of NIC currently);
3. Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall (customization by packages, but designed initially for old PC);

I guess Voyage or openwrt would be better since they are the most flexible and permit to change a lot of stuff.

Linux and IEEE 802.11

This is quite tricky to verify what a NIC is supported by Linux and with which feature.

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers references all the drivers, and what they implement.

We took care to:

• suport of the mesh mode
• dual band: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g
• we should only use old NIC (they are well known and often the bugs have been already solved)

In particular:

1. AR9220 chipset which supports the IEEE 802.11 abg (ath9k driver, http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k)
2. AR9170 chipset for the usb NIC