I'm using 802.11s - with BATMAN on two Mercusys MR90X, and I'm planning on switching to mesh11sd. Do you think it's a better idea?
BATMAN throttles my device speed by a lot. And I have to create various Access Points such as Guest, IoT. Both the nodes are roughly 20ft away from each other. Would I be better off with mesh11sd or BATMAN or normal 802.11s mesh?
Not answering your question, but posing another:
Why do you have 2 APs a mere 20 feet from each other? This really is not sufficient in terms of separation in order to have good roaming performance and it is likely that a single ap would perform well (possibly even better than 2 in a mesh configuration).
You need an 802.11s mesh, too, even if you want to use batman-adv. Wireless adhoc mode is mostly no longer supported by hardware, therefore .11s is the only options left. But you then disable the forwarding mode of .11s.
Batman-adv is a deamon to make better forwarding decisions on layer-2 and has nothing to do with roaming of clients, what is sadly called "mesh" by many consumer electronics manufacturers...
To be clear, 802.11s is a wireless frame type designed to support mesh backhaul. It is not a "mesh system" and does not have active mesh protocols by default.
Mesh11sd uses the 802.11s frame type to enable and manage the layer 2 mac-routing protocol built into the kernel (aka HWMP). It enables active, self healing multi point to multi point wireless layer 2 communications allowing autonomous building of a mesh backhaul. BUT it is "wireless layer 2" and therefore does not support vlans directly.
BATMAN uses the 802.11s frame type to enable layer 3 tunnelling over ipv6 between nodes allowing multi point to multi point autonomous building of a mesh backhaul. As it uses a layer 3 tunnel on top of the node to node layer 2 connection, it supports vlans directly.
Do you have vlans over the Batman mesh?
The use cases of mesh11sd and Batman overlap to a significant degree, but built in vlan support is one property where there is no overlap.
There are many other differences, but for your case of a small home/office network, these other differences do not matter.
I really do suspect that with only 20ft separating your two nodes, you will be far better off investing in a 20ft ethernet cable!
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My TV is in the hall, and I'd like to stream Remux (100GB Blue-Ray files) over the internet - and the internet gateway is at my work-room, I don't want cables flying around the whole home.
This, I understood.
Is this supposed to be better than my current BATMAN Configuration that I have with VLAN Tagging for each of my Access Points? The problem is, the internet speed is throttled by 25 to 30%.
I'm looking for a WiFi only solution, as of now plain 802.11s Mesh seems to work. BATMAN seems to throttle, and wanted to know if Mesh11sd is any better than BATMAN in terms of speed. If 802.11s Mesh is the only way to go for my scenario, GRE-Tunneling to create separate Access Points work?
What is the Internet speed?
What band/channel/bandwidth are you using?
Depends on many things, but if you want vlans, Batman has this built in.
Apart from potential copyright issues, you are using 2 fairly expensive devices to avoid a single very low cost ethernet cable. All seems very odd.
You should look more at what the MR90X's are achieving connection wise, before you complicate the mix even more. You are only creating a single peer to peer link over 6 metres after all.