Community Networks are large scale, self-organized and decentralized networks, built and operated by citizens for citizens. In this paper, we make a case for research on and with community networks, while explaining the relation to Community-Lab. The latter is an open, distributed infrastructure for researchers to experiment with community networks. The goal of Community-Lab is to advance research and empower society by understanding and removing obstacles for these networks and services.

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Using a static link state routing metric in wireless mesh and mobile ad hoc networks without major efforts in optimizing the physical link properties has proven to be inefficient. It does not take into account link quality information. While some link metrics try to estimate channel properties based on layer-3 observations, more sophisticated metrics need to access layer-2 information directly. The new 802.11 netlink interface provides a common local interface for Linux based systems and thus the basis for practical usage in community networks. However, a standardized radio-to-router communication protocol to access layer-2 information will allow to go beyond the limitations of having all radio interfaces built directly into the router device. While the PPPoE protocol generally can be applied to this scenario, it has some drawbacks when used in wireless mesh networks. The new DLEP protocol is supported by the IETF MANET group to fill this gap. In this paper we describe the advantages of a flexible node design for community networks based on the DLEP protocol. In addition, we present our implementation of the DLEP protocol and discuss some important deviations from the current draft version of the standard

The OLSR.org implementation of OLSRv1 (olsrd) is one of the most widely deployed open source mesh routing daemons. The extensive use of olsrd in community networks provided valuable insights leading to the design of OLSRv2 and the development of the OLSR.org network framework (OONF). In this paper, we describe this evolutionary process and our OLSRv2 implementation based on OONF which also supports embedded platforms. In addition, we present some enhanced features unique to our implementation. These features include means to increase the self-configuration capabilities also in mixed setups of IPv4-only, IPv6-only and dual-stack configurations. The implementation process and the protocol evaluation have been supported by the Virtual Confine Testbed, extended by a Rician fading model. This allows for bug identification in the code and for a first but realistic performance comparison between OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 for wireless links. These results will also allow for targeted extensions of OLSRv2 for a better trade-off between the new flexibility of the type-length-value-based packet format RFC5444 and the efficiency of a binary format like the one OLSRv1 uses