Hi folks,

I am Linus Lüssing from Lübeck (ok, some 'L's too many, but not my fault ;) ), a city in Northern Germany at the Baltic Sea. I am 23 years old and currently a Bachelor's degree student in Computer Science - which actually did not involve any mesh networking so far at all. However I've been fascinated of the Freifunk idea since I first heard of it.

Therefore I got in touch with B.A.T.M.A.N., especially the kernel module B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced, about three years ago where we have been playing a little with this kind of new technology and implementations and trying to guess what kind of weird stuff this tricky wifi layer was doing. And it was also a very vibrant impression of being somehow involved in an Open Source Software Project for the first time. I was quite astonished about the direct, personal support and open way of sharing experiences and giving feedback.

During the last years I got more and more addicted to this and also tried to join several events, like the Chaos Communication Congress, the Wireless Battle Mesh or the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. For a lot of new, conceptual ideas it was just more feasible to chat about it face-to-face. And there were a lot of ideas in this still kind of new, experimental field :).

It has been much fun so far and it is a great opportunity and an honour to be able to make some more of these ideas a reality during the Google Summer Of Code 2011 and to contribute to the Linux kernel, meshing, the community and Open Source Software in general.

During the GSoC 2011 I am working on some modularization of the core routing protocol, splitting the OGM protocol as known of BATMAN IV into an ELP (Echo Location Protocol, responsible for link, one hop tasks), OGM (will be responsible for the routing between nodes only, without the knowledge of separate links underneath) and a new MGO protocol (Message Guided towards Originator, a mechanism to be able to recover from sudden path degradation quicker) in BATMAN V.

Let's make the world a better place, bit by bit :).

Cheers, Linus