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prpl Foundation Sponsors Wireless Battle of the Mesh Event

SANTA CLARA, CA, July 30, 2015 – The prpl Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation focused on enabling next-generation datacenter-to-device portable software and virtualized architectures, today announced its sponsorship of the annual Wireless Battle of the Mesh (commonly referred to as 'BattleMesh') event, to be held Aug. 3-9 in Maribor, Slovenia.

BattleMesh brings together mesh networking enthusiasts, community networking activists, and developers of mesh protocols, firmware and management systems from across the world to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, like Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX6, OLSR, 802.11s and Static Routing.

The goal of the tournament is to set up hands-on test beds for each available mesh routing protocol with a standard test procedure for the different mesh networks. During the different BattleMesh events, hardware and software configuration based on the OpenWrt Board Support Package will be used along with packages for each protocol implementation. The event also provides an opportunity for participants to develop testing tools for PHY/MAC radio layers (drivers, scripts and PHY analyzers).

"We have created a specific BattleMesh-ready OpenWrt GitHub repository to be the baseline software stack; the hardware that will be used for experiments will be based on Qualcomm Atheros chipsets (as has been the case previously), because we have upstream Wi-Fi driver support – so all participants will be focused on the same starting point as the reference hardware and software stack," said Simon Wunderlich, the event's organizer.

This year's tournament also features talks and workshops to discuss the latest developments and new ideas in OpenWrt, Mesh protocols and network management tools such as map tools, as well as social events.

"The prpl Foundation is delighted to sponsor the BattleMesh event as it aligns with our philosophy of leveraging industry collaboration, open standards and the open source community to drive interoperability and security from device to datacenter," said Art Swift, president of the prpl foundation. "Our involvement with BattleMesh highlights our active support of the OpenWrt community and initiatives with our prplWrt engineering working group – especially since the event leverages hardware from Qualcomm, a prpl member company, to standardize the test platform."

About prpl

prpl (pronounced "Purple"), is an open-source, community-driven, collaborative, non-profit foundation targeting and supporting the MIPS architecture – and open to others – with a focus on enabling next-generation datacenter-to-device portable software and virtualized architectures. prpl represents leaders in the technology industry investing in innovation in efficiency, portability and compatibility for the good of a broad community of developers, businesses and consumers. Initial domains targeted by prpl include datacenter, networking & storage, connected consumer and embedded/IoT. See: www.prplfoundation.org.

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