New Experimental Radio Modes and SSID

Following on the heels of the inclusion of the Babel routing protocol to the AREDN software is another significant enhancement: nightly build 20250219 adds PtP (Point to Point) and PtMP (Point to MultiPoint) configurations. These protocols can be found in the Radio section of the AREDN UI:

Here's a brief explanation of each of them:

• Mesh PtMP: This makes a node act like your common access point, where Mesh Station nodes can connect to it, but not to each other, and the Mesh PtMP can only connect to Station nodes.

• Mesh PtP: Same as above except only a single Station is permitted to connect, specified by a MAC address.

• Mesh Station: Can connect to a Mesh PtMP or, if it’s the authorized node, a Mesh PtP. It cannot connect to anything else.

The new modes also require a new SSID. This changed SSID is a necessary by-product of how these modes are implemented. Our current Mesh uses the WiFi Ad-Hoc radio mode, while these new modes use the WiFi Infrastructure (sometimes called Manager) radio mode. Infrastructure Stations will connect by matching the appropriate SSID, without regard for any channel setting. Therefore, to make sure Stations connect to their correct end-point, we encode the channel in these new SSIDs. For example, if you have a Mesh PtMP node on channel 175 at 10 MHz, the SSID would be AREDN-175-10-v3.

Consider this feature EXPERIMENTAL. We are releasing it for feedback from the community. We know that Infrastructure radio mode is better supported and we suspect it provides better compatibility between vendors compared to AdHoc mode, and supports higher bandwidths. We’d like to get feedback from the community to see if this is true, if this is useful, and if it’s worth the support costs of including this in future releases.