With batman-adv, as long as one device was already online and ready to go before the second device was turned on, they would form a mesh network. The problem came when the devices were turned on far away from each other then brought close, they wouldn't connect because they each had their own cell ID. In order to form a proper mesh network they needed to have the same cell ID, where instead they seemed to just make up their own cell IDs, even though I defined what it should be. Does that make sense?

Any ideas anyone?

Any luck figuring this out? I'm running into the exact same issue with no success.