Was there a blog post or anywhere you guys catalogued these problems, your approaches, and what could be learned? I'm looking to take on a similar challenge as a generalist and would love to learn from your attempts :)
For example, here he proposes a hack on top of 802.11s to switch between reactive and adaptive mesh topologies based on measuring the network density -- if you're a small group of kids in a village you want a reactive network, which comes with higher bandwidth saturation costs, but if all the kids come into the same classroom at once you need to quickly switch to adaptive to avoid using up all the spectrum with routing detection:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/MAD_Heuristics
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/MAD_Architecture
The 802.11s spec is pretty useless for high density areas without such a hack, it seems. I suppose the takeaway message is that your use of mesh networking needs to be extremely tailored to your specific use case, quite possibly including writing custom routing software.
John Gilmore also wrote a summary of the OLPC mesh experience here: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/...
I'm not saying this to discourage others from trying. But they should definitely be teams of network protocol experts, rather than a generalist team trying to put a product together as we were. We used 802.11s, and being the largest deployment of a protocol you weren't planning on having to fix yourself isn't an enviable position.