On 5/7/25 12:36, Orv Beach wrote:

This release heralds some major changes with AREDN® and we encourage you to take a moment to read about them below,

Major Enhancements

Babel Routing

The AREDN® team is introducing Babel as a replacement for the older OLSR routing technology. OLSR has served us well, but has many problems we’ve had to live with over the years. Babel, on the other hand, has many qualities which make it a good fit AREDN®. First, it’s a loop free protocol so, regardless of how the network is changing, routing loops will never form in the network. Second, it has a   substantially lower traffic overhead so is good for slow, low bandwidth links. Third, the protocol adapts to the differences between wired, wireless, and tunneled links. Fourth, as a layer-3 routing protocol, it integrates easily with AREDN®. Fifth, it’s highly configurable. Finally, it’s simple. This video is a great primer on Babel.

In this release Babel and OLSR will run side-by-side, with Babel routing used where available, and OLSR used otherwise. No configuration is necessary. You will see a three-stars symbol on neighbors which support Babel, and a new three-stars symbol on the left-hand menu where you can see what services Babel nodes are advertising.

It's critical to move to this production release; the more nodes are running it, the sooner we can remove OLSR from our network.

More on the switch to Babel can be found here: https://docs.arednmesh.org/en/latest/arednHow-toGuides/babel.html#adding-babel-as-an-aredn-routing-protocol

Deprecating Tiny Firmware Nodes

This will be the last major release to support tiny firmware builds for older nodes. These older nodes have too little memory for us to support them while transitioning from OLSR to Babel. They will not contain these new Babel changes and, when one day OLSR is gone, they will no longer be able to connect to the network.

These are the models currently seen on the network that will drop off at some as yet undefined point in the future:

Note that while these devices are old and slow, the XW versions of them have enough RAM to not have to run the tiny build and thus will be able to stay connected after being upgraded to this production release.

Migrate Legacy Tunnels

Legacy tunnels are not able to carry the Babel protocol. Everyone has made good progress converting legacy tunnels to Wireguard tunnels since Wireguard was introduced, but we want to encourage those who have not made the switch yet to do so. Unfortunately we cannot do this automatically so once OLSR is removed, legacy tunnels will no longer work.

Documentation on setting up Wireguard tunnels can be found here: https://docs.arednmesh.org/en/latest/arednGettingStarted/node_admin.html#add-tunnel

PtP and PtMP RF modes

This release adds PtP (point to point) and PtMP (point to multipoint) RF modes to complement our existing AdHoc mode. AREDN® has always done mesh networking by putting radios into AdHoc mode and this remains the default. These additional options allow for more optimal performance and better network management by making use of WiFi infrastructure mode.

We’ve seen notable throughput and latency improvements when using these modes, especially with 802.11ac devices. This  holds true even when mixing radios from different manufacturers. 

Documentation on these modes can be found here:  https://docs.arednmesh.org/en/latest/arednGettingStarted/node_admin.html#mesh-ptp-settings

Memory Limitations

During the transition between OLSR and Babel, nodes will be running two sets of routing and service discovery daemons. This increases the memory footprint of AREDN®. On some nodes running extra services, especially those with active tunnels and hotspots, you may experience out-of-memory errors. Until OLSR is deprecated in future releases, we advise you to reduce this extra burden on these devices as much as possible. This is most likely to occur on the hAP AC Lite as they are a general workhorse for many and only have 64M of RAM.

Known Issues

Other Enhancements

Over and above those major additions, these enhancements have been added:

New Device Support

Fixes

Enjoy!

The AREDN Team





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