One of our local group have raised a question about SSID beacon packets. He believes that they do not contain "station ID" info required by Part 97 (Node Name).

I searched for a description of the entire protocol stack used by Broadband Hamnet firmware, and could not find one. Only very brief verbal references to TCP/IP (which I'm very familiar with) and less familiar with 802.11.

Does a detailed stack description exist? Can someone point me to it?

Specific question is: "Does the protocol stack, at some level, identify EVERY packet with callsign (Node Name)?"  But the full question is, is there ONE place one can look to find the entire stack explained?

Joe

AG6QO@AG6QO.#NCA.CA.USA.NOAM

Well from BBHN standpoint s specification as to what is in each "version" is a little weak, it's all documented in the code that is publically avaliable but has not been well defined on a webpage yet. One of those projects I haven't had much time to do but is relevant to the discussion currently being had on the v4 protocol specs. Some of these specs are not even set by us and would never be in our standards (for example in theory this network could run over a laser beam path instead of 802.11)

A full protocol specification would be a bit much to get into (you don't really want me to describe 802.11 in full gory detail do you? :) suffices to say for regulatory it can be described as  "An IP network as defined by IETF public standards  operating on top of an IEEE  documented  802.11 RF layer on <insert frequency here> at <insert channel width here> width with an OLSR routing daemon" (feel free to pull up the FULL encoding standards on these from the appropriate regulatory body)

It is correct that that the SSID packets do not contain any callsign details. There is no room in the protocol for this extra extra details and it is not needed either. Many hams in the past used this as a method to setup networks that belonged to them and only them (largely becaus Windows did not make it easy to identify in any other way) but am SSID is more of a group affiliation/ way to share frequencies (similar to a tone sql code) than it is an identification.

In BBHN identification is handled by the /usr/local/bin/fccid program that every 5 minutes runs, waits an offset amount of time (less then 5 minutes ) to help stagger identifications, and then sends a IP/UDP packet out with "ID: NodeName" on port 4919 to perform the actual identification. If you cared to see these you could use the tcpdump package to watch the RF interface.

In addition the OLSR stack sends out a correlation of IP address  and node callsigns thst extends across the entire network so one may corelate downstream as well.

With the fccid program and the fact we are running atop well defined documented standards (aka the FCC upon request to the IEEE can figure out how to demodulate the RF into a binary bit stream)  we perform the identification in a window that is less than 10 minutes in length between to keep the device compliant.