If you want a layer 2 mesh (like a switch over Wifi) use batman-adv and 802.11s - This works fine even on a 10$ TP-Link 841N. You likely want to have a model wi

If you want a layer 2 mesh (like a switch over Wifi) use batman-adv and 802.11s - This works fine even on a 10$ TP-Link 841N. You likely want to have a model with 8mb flash and 64mb memory - otherwise there is not much stuff for other packages. Use OpenWRT Chaos Calmer, that is the latest stable released and quite good documented at openwrt.org wiki. This is something that should work fine: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mesh.batman https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mesh.batman There was a split and now most of the former OpenWRT devs build LEDE - but they don't have a release yet, however if you need support for newer routers or it's there. It's pretty close to the Linux kernel and most fixes (and also breakage) are timely there. http://www.lede-project.org http://www.lede-project.org for routing: There is olsrdv1 and the new and shiny OLSRv2 that uses IPv6 link-local addresses and has a new metric for optimizing links that takes a lot of stuff into account like packet loss, throughput and so on. https://olsrd.org https://olsrd.org There is also babel where lot's of stuff is happening - there is experimental layer3 roaming https://github.com/jech/babeld https://github.com/jech/babeld https://github.com/tcatm/l3roamd https://github.com/tcatm/l3roamd I'm not sure if that's true but I think batman is the best solution for smaller meshes (<50?) in bigger meshes layer2 overhead is a problem. There are a lot of active communities related to mesh networking: There is a yearly conference where they benchmark their mesh implementations against each other. Pretty interesting stuff: http://battlemesh.org/ http://battlemesh.org/ It's really plug'n'play yet if you do it on your own and don't use a mesh firmware i.e. https://libre-mesh.org https://libre-mesh.org https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Deploy_an_emergency_Libre-Mesh_network_with_local_services https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Deploy_an... Or the software used in a lot of places for freifunk.net meshes in Germany: https://github.com/freifunk-gluon https://github.com/freifunk-gluon I'm sure I've forgotten something but these are projects that care about meshes.