With the addition of Audience, I think it's time to bring this up again. There should be no technical or licensing limits stopping this feature and it's in mainline kernel for a long time.

mikrotik's current mesh is not very good. It's little more than an RTSP replacement for 'repeater mode' APs and is completely useless in a 'real' mesh design.


My request is:

A new batmanadv interface
ap-bridge WDS that allows for the batmanadv interface to be selected for bridge
ability to put the batmanadv interface in another bridge.
and expose batman-adv features in the UI, such as interface alternative vs bonding, and hop penalty.
any interface that can be added to a bridge can be added to batmanadv

There are a few use cases. First, the obvious:
1)
A MESH NETWORK! yes, using mikrotik boards and radios to build a multi-radio mesh network utilizing batman-adv would allow for the worlds first professional and cost effective mesh system that doesn't have a 50% hop penalty. The combination of 2.4/5/60Ghz radios to build a hybrid mesh really changes the game on mesh by eliminating the primary drawbacks of 50% hop penalty and price.

2)
A much bigger 'meshy' layer2 network for wISPs.
Many wisps build out complicated routed network designs because a flat layer2 network has too many issues. A new batman-adv interface would allow a wISP to build a layer2-like simple network with multipathing, interface bonding, rapid failover etc by virtue of batman-adv and then take advantage of mikrotik features like dot1X, dhcp-relay and snooping.

to expand on this, batmanadv sends health packets between links and rates those links for health, though it doesn't take down an unhealthy interface like OSPF would, it just decreases the chances of routing clients through that path.
the current routing model can look at wireless link stats and throughput testing etc to determine throughput. this is new and evolving and something the wisp market could really use.

+1 on this, this is game changer for wISP