A long time ago, I set up a mesh with a bunch of WRT-54Gs and OpenWRT using olsrd for the routing protocol. It worked pretty well as far as I could tell, but I

A long time ago, I set up a mesh with a bunch of WRT-54Gs and OpenWRT using olsrd for the routing protocol. It worked pretty well as far as I could tell, but I never setup a proper test to see if multi-hop routing was working well. (My setup was within a house, so basically all the nodes were in range of each other.) For any large mesh, using a proper routing protocol is a good idea; the default behavior of ethernet it to construct a spanning tree and prune any links that would result in a cycle, which leads to suboptimal routing if you have more than two routers. There's been a lot of interesting research in wireless routing. One of the more interesting ideas [1] is to use the probability of packet loss as part of the link cost metric, to discourage routers from always using the path with the fewest number of hops, which might be very unreliable. It's been about a decade since I looked at any of this stuff, so I don't know what the state of the art is these days. [1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom03/paper.pdf https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom03/paper.pdf