Mesh Networking
From HacDC Wiki
Meetings Thursdays at 7:30ish starting 10 Feb 2011
Brainstorming
Official Project Page
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.
- shortwave
- 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