RPL, pronounced Ripple is an IETF protocol that provides connectivity among nodes that can not all hear each other, but rather have to form a multihop mesh-like network. The name comes a Grateful Dead Song.

if my words did glow
With the gold of sunshine
and my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
would you hear my voice
come through the music
would you hold it near
as it were your own

its a hand me down
the thoughts are broken
perhaps
they're better left unsung

ripple, in still water
where there is no pebble tossed
nor wind to blow.

reach out your hand,
if your cup is empty
if your cup is full,
may be be again.

=====

Unlike other mesh efforts, this all happens at layer-3, in IPv6 ICMP messages (originally, was going to be in Router Solicitation/ND messages).

This set of programs, plus a test bed/simulation system is a set of tools that runs under the Linux kernel: - on netbooks, - laptops, and - on phones like the Google Android, Raspberry PI, OpenWRT, etc..

Programs include: sunshine - run this on root/grounded server to announce routes and on any other well provisioned machines.

glow		- run this on very underpowered machines that
                    just need enough to join the DAG [PLANNED]

pebble		- insert DIO messages into the network, run from
		the command line [currently: senddao, senddio]

blow		- cmd line utility to control sunshine and glow.
                    [PLANNED]

===== community

Web site: http://unstrung.sandelman.ca/

Github: http://github.com/mcr/unstrung.git/

to subscribe to mailing list: https://lists.sandelman.ca/mailman/listinfo/unstrung-hackers

====== OpenWRT

See packaging/openwrt/OPENWRT.md for help on building for OpenWRT CC+.

====== Testing environment

This is based upon the UML-Network Testing Infrastructure (UNTI... pronounced like the british "aUNTIe") UML is UserModeLinux -- a completely paravirtualized virtualization technnology from the turn of the century.

The UMLroot image that goes with it can not be created as stock wheezy "debootstrap" image. An image that works can be found at: http://junk.sandelman.ca/umlroot/umlroot-38.tgz

In addition, there are extensive unit tests, which are invokved by "make unitcheck", and which run on travis-ci.org, see: https://travis-ci.org/mcr/unstrung/

====== Unit Tests

On a fully loaded host, if you've built libpcap with many other libraries present, then you will need additional link options for the pieces that need libpcap. Specifically, you'll need:

LIBPCAP=-L/home/mcr/stuff/x86/libpcap-1.8.0 -lpcap -lpthread -ldbus-1

In Makefile.local.

The script build-setup-travis.sh may be useful to compile to correct version of libpcap and tcpdump. Note it writes to ~/stuff, and it will overwrite your Makefile.local.

Michael Richardson [email protected], Ottawa, Ontario, October 2009-2015.