Ad-hoc (IBSS) mode in Beaglebone Black Wireless

[M I Syed]

I am working on a project where I have to build a mesh (ad-hoc network). I have few Beaglebone Black Wireless for that but I'm a newbie in the BBBW world. However I cannot set the board to IBSS mode; I get "Operation not supported (-95)" error. BATMAN and BABEL do not work if I just set the mode to 'mesh'.  I believe there would be some way to enable the IBSS mode. I'm using Debian 9.5 2018-10-07 4GB SD IoT image.

[drhun...@gmail.com]

There is no support for ad-hoc mode in the wl18xx driver. It was dropped several years ago.

Iain 

[M I Syed]

Thanks for the reply. I believe there would be some other driver that supports ad-hoc mode?

[Iain Hunter]

There is no support in the Wl18xx Wi-Fi device on the BBBW, neither in
the Linux driver nor the actual device firmware.
If you want ad-hoc you would need to use a USB dongle with a Wi-Fi
that does support ad-hoc, but then you might as well use a BBB for
that.

There is low level support for TI's 802.11s mesh implementation but as
far as I know it does not work out of the box on a Debian package. See
this thread from a couple of months ago for details
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/beagleboard/mesh%7Csort:date/beagleboard/XS7cwEto_B4/otnvmgsFBQAJ

Iain

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[M I Syed]

Thanks a lot for your kind reply. I will have a look

[don_wrt]

Hello Lain,

ad-hoc is point-to-point conn. routing and some other things are on the top of the this connections.  It is needed process such a BATMAN for routing packet over multiple hops running top of this ad-hoc conn. If I am not wrong BATMAN can work on the BBBW. So, does this mean that BBBW support ad-hoc mode? or, BATMAN may work on the BBBW without need of ad-hoc?