Mesh Networking

Meetings Thursdays at 7:30ish starting 10 Feb 2011

Brainstorming

Official Project Page

Byzantium

The notes below were used while formulating the project. Further notes available on the now-Ongoing project page.

Directions

Which way will we head with this?

• support Networking_Strategic_Simulation
• community wifi
• cold hard maxout of the current tech
• Development of communication devices with readily available (i.e., cheap) technology.
• Communication technology which lends itself to improvisational construction.

What Next?

After we have our direction what are we gonna do?

• define coverage
  • building
  • block
  • neighborhood
  • city
  • intercity
  • regional
  • infinite (assuming it will grow with the technology's ability to support it)
• audience - who's gonna use this
• purpose - what will this be used for (surfing the web or just email/twitter/<insert favorite text service here>)
• Use case - circumstances under which this technology will usually be deployed
  • ISP/ISP replacement
  • disaster
  • communication infrastructure failure
  • censorship

Aproaches

Mesh

What will our approach to the network level of the mesh be?

• broadcast
• "actor" oriented - assume no knowledge in other nodes
• nested - roll with what exists and use it to connect seperate traditional nets
• Hybrid
  • clients communicate using wifi with hubs
  • hubs relay traffic using one of the mesh networking protocols
  • IPv6 makes the addressing for this very sensible. address: [1st half highest node "subnet"][further refinement or subnets][last block device id unique within the subnet]

Extension

If we need to augment our mesh to cover our target area how will we do that?

• "same stuff but on a larger physical scale"
  • mesh nodes with more broadcast power
  • some mesh nodes also have point-to-point links with each other
    • tight-beam RF
    • optical
      • laser
      • incoherent light
• a higher order traditional network

Crazy Ideas

• viral node generation - present captive portals on carriers that require the user to become a "infected" and themselves present captive portals to other non infected devices (zombie smartphone apocalypse)
• make it easy and fun for people to join
  • mesh networking app in appstores
  • add something fun to make them want to install the app, like a game or a visualization
  • as long as they play once in a while, they route traffic (tamagochi effect)
• one-stop shop router reflashing
  • flash your Linksys WAP, automatically have mesh networking support active in the background
• TonidoPlug?
• datacomm over
  • shortwave
    • Note: requires more than two hams to participate
  • FRS (been done before but would be an interesting experiment)
  • GMRS (been done before but would be an interesting experiment)
  • laser pointer with a photocell receiver
  • incoherent light Ronja
  • Sneakernet with rsync-like functionality (project: mnemonic?)
  • Slideshow
  • One relatively large video screen
  • One relatively decent webcam (not hard)
  • Video screen displays sequences of 2D barcodes
  • Computer with webcam reads and decodes barcodes
    • Reminds me a bit of Conway's Game of Life as a network technology.
• Fidomail-like transfer and synchronization of data bundles
  • dialup
  • tight-beam datacomm of some kind
  • sneakernet (project: mnemonic?)
  • Cross-technology implementation
    • Web forums
    • Microblogs
    • Blogs
    • BBS software
• Automated sending and decoding of Morse code
  • Might not be all that fast but would be easy to implement and fun to test the bandwidth of.
• How could we abuse SMS for this?
• Mobile nodes
  • Someone sets up a (small) node in their car and drives around slowly.
  • Set up in a backpack or under a coat
    • On bicycle
    • On rollerblades
    • On skateboard
    • ON UAV
    • On a balloon

Project

Journal

MeshNetworkingMeeting_20110210

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