Mesh Networks

In some places, such as rural areas, mountains, and huge production facilities, cable and fiber networks are difficult to build and maintain. Mesh networks with many wireless nodes that connect to each other are extremely helpful for covering large areas and bringing the Internet to these places. OpenWrt supports several types of mesh network setups:

• The Mesh11sd Project is an IEEE 802.11s mesh management daemon for OpenWrt [11]. It is designed to simplify the autonomous creation and management of wireless mesh networks. This project is a great starting point for network beginners.
• B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking) is a routing protocol for mobile and ad hoc (spontaneously formed) networks. The main concept is based on aggressive decentralization, eliminating the need for main nodes that know the entire network map. All traffic flows from node to node via individually dynamic routes for each packet [12].

More Interesting OpenWrt Features

Other interesting OpenWrt components include:

• UCI (Unified Configuration Interface): A small utility that centralizes the complete configuration of an OpenWrt device. For example, the command uci add firewall guest_zone adds a new zone to the firewall, and uci commit firewall does configuration verification and writes the new configuration to the disk.
• SQM (Smart Queue Management): An integrated system that performs per-packet and per-flow network scheduling, active queue management, traffic shaping, rate limiting, and QoS prioritization. This helps fight connection latency, which is important for audio and video chats, multiplayer gaming sessions, and more [13].
• Flow offloading: A technique that significantly increases the throughput of devices with slow CPUs. Flow offloading takes the form of a firewall rule that moves packet forwarding work from the CPU-driven netfilter/conntrack path to a fast kernel-level forwarding path. This is a very useful option for weak or old devices [14].
• Multi-WAN: Connect to a secondary Internet provider for better speed and network stability [15].
• Travelmate: A connection manager for travel routers that is very useful for tourists. This tool is extremely helpful for portable devices with multiple connection profiles and helps automatically connect to the closest known access point [16].
• Audio support: Transform the router into a music station and play music through connected speakers or Bluetooth [17]. If a router isn't equipped with Bluetooth, the easiest way to connect speakers is to purchase a USB sound card or USB-C headphone jack adapter.

Conclusion

This article only mentions a fraction of OpenWrt's features, but this fraction is enough to show that OpenWrt is a fantastic project that provides many extra options for devices that have been abandoned by their manufacturers. There is a whole world inside these black-and-white cases and antennas. For instance, Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite Internet service, uses routers that run on OpenWrt-based firmware. OpenWrt is a budget-friendly option for building networks of all sizes – for students, retirees, researchers, nonprofit organizations, commercial firms, and even tech giants.

The Author

Paul Nixer has been a Linux user and FOSS advocate since the late 2000s. He is passionate about privacy, security, networks, and community-driven development. Find Paul on Mastodon at: https://mastodon.social/@paulnixer.