Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
[Commotion] is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. This can be used to create a wireless LAN for Serval-enabled handsets to run on top of, or it can be used to create an access network in general. The point here is that it's distributed, as opposed to every connection going back to a central wireless or wireline provider."
Posted Feb 20, 2011 17:25 UTC (Sun)
by sturmflut (subscriber, #38256)
[Link] (6 responses)
To my knowledge to this date there is no single solution which scales up to thousands of nodes and can cover a larger area. At some point all those networks do no longer scale and need to be backed up by a larger network running on wires - like the Internet. Mesh networks built on top of standard WiFi hardware also suffer from bad performance, since passing the same frame from one node to another blocks the radio channel multiple times - for all nodes. See the "Hidden station" and "Exposed station" problems.
If wireless meshes were the solution, anybody would already use them. The technology has been there since the eighties. In reality there are only a few installations for some special cases and the rest runs on wires.
Posted Feb 20, 2011 18:47 UTC (Sun)
by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
[Link] (1 responses)
AFAIU, the theoretical limit to mesh networking is that the mean throughput of a mesh network asymptotically approaches zero as participation grows, because of the overhead of relaying peer data. Which seems to imply that whatever technology is being used, at some relative size it's more beneficial to fragment the mesh network. But this would be a nice problem to have, if we should be so lucky.
Posted Feb 21, 2011 0:37 UTC (Mon)
by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
[Link]
Posted Feb 20, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sun)
by tpo (subscriber, #25713)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 21, 2011 9:47 UTC (Mon)
by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
[Link]
Posted Feb 22, 2011 9:17 UTC (Tue)
by sturmflut (subscriber, #38256)
[Link] (1 responses)
Athens Wireless and Freifunk build infrastructure using fixed nodes and directed radio links, and connect clients to it. The clients are not part of the mesh itself, so Athens wireless may have ~5000 nodes in total, but only 1000 of those are mesh nodes. The whole structure is mostly fixed, with a central organization handing out addresses etc. At the end of the day those infrastructure mesh networks are not different from wired networks or cellular networks. There is hardly any difference between a directed radio link and a wire.
A true ad-hoc network spanning a whole country or even a whole continent, built out of highly mobile nodes without any central administration, is a completely different type of problem. It does not compare to any of those existing "mesh" efforts. The overhead is immense, and you could certainly not cover an area larger than a couple of square kilometres without structured routing and wires.
Just imagine a data packet traveling from New York to Google in Mountain View and back, a thing happening trillions of times every day. The total distance is about 5800 miles. If that distance is to be covered by mesh nodes with WiFi interfaces, and you manage to max out the WiFi Range at 300 metres between two nodes, there are 15766 nodes between the two endpoints. There is no mesh protocol which could find such a long path in acceptable time with acceptable resources. And if the forwarding of the packet over one hop just takes 100 microseconds (the value will probably be much higher in reality) the round-trip time is already over three seconds. An average Internet uplink does the same within milliseconds.
Thus mobile ad-hoc networks always need to be backed up by higher-level, structured networks run by some organization, and at some point (e.g. to cross oceans) they need to rely on wires. Which makes those organizations normal ISPs again. And you gain nothing, because then they would be subject to government regulations again. So there is no "Wireless Mesh technology stack for Internet Freedom". Maybe you can do it in a larger city with a couple thousand friends, but not with whole countries and millions of people. When they pulled the plug in egypt wireless meshes could not have provided any noticeable service to the whole society, just to some small elite with the appropriate tools. And in my definition that is not "freedom".
Posted Feb 22, 2011 19:28 UTC (Tue)
by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
[Link]
> Thus mobile ad-hoc networks always need to be backed up by higher-level, structured networks run by some organization, and at some point (e.g. to cross oceans) they need to rely on wires. Which makes those organizations normal ISPs again.
Yes, likely wires will be needed, but nothing prevents a non-structured mesh of distributed long haul providers from cooperating using mesh like protocols designed to take advantage of wired optimizations, from servicing many of those needs. Distributed control does not have to mean elimination of all large organizations, it just has to eliminate single large organizations controlling things (i.e. monopolies). The only part of the internet controlled by one organization right now is IPs and DNS allocations. And this centralized control isn't even to solve a technical problem such as routing, that is already distributed by many organizations today. But, yes, it would be better to distribute more of the infrastructure, to have more independent ISPs, more independent infrastructure.
As for allocating IPs and DNS, well, there are many things which could potentially replace the current schemes, the work underway on the DNS part is getting some press for sure. But, IPs are even simpler in many ways, because an IP does not have to be human readable, simple schemes such as the way tor allocates onion addresses can be used to distributed this, without requiring a registry like DNS does.
Mesh networking is making a big splash because it is new. But, decentralizing the internet is actually a much simpler problem than solving mesh networking. It's just that to decentralize the internet (IPs and DNS), you would have to abandon some of the old ways of doing things, and people aren't really willing to just do that without a real pressing need to. It's really a bit like moving to IPv6. Perhaps now is the time to do it, before we make that transition, or as a part of that transition? In fact, I suspect that moving to a non centralized IP allocation scheme might even be simpler than moving to IPv6. Why not simply throw the old allocation scheme away when moving to IPv6?
The appeal of mesh networking is mostly that it is new territory, so there is nothing old to abandon/transition, and people can experiment with it easily. It also makes people question the old assumptions that centralized control is needed, so it gets the press (and mind share). Fixing the old, slightly broken existing infrastructure, that get ways less attention. However, I suspect that eventually, the old assumptions will be seen to be flawed, and some headway will be made to clean up the existing infrastructure.
Posted Feb 20, 2011 18:44 UTC (Sun)
by jkeogh (guest, #27567)
[Link] (4 responses)
it's written in python and under active development:
Technical pdf's:
Posted Feb 20, 2011 19:57 UTC (Sun)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 20, 2011 20:36 UTC (Sun)
by thegeek (guest, #73042)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 20, 2011 21:02 UTC (Sun)
by dr@jones.dk (subscriber, #7907)
[Link]
Posted Feb 20, 2011 21:02 UTC (Sun)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2011 15:23 UTC (Mon)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2011 15:29 UTC (Mon)
by jjs (guest, #10315)
[Link]
For those who doubt, the Bergen Linux Users Group successfully implemented RFC 1149 in April 2001.
Posted Feb 21, 2011 16:51 UTC (Mon)
by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
[Link]
Having a self configuring network topology would be of interest, a bit like the way a flock of birds configure themselves into an efficient flying machine. But I think the economic use case might have to be similar to an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) scenario, e.g. supplying a couple of hundred laptops to a village where there is no other network so the laptops must self-organise one, and it is presumed that community solidarity overrides any other economic self interest of the participants, to the extent that a node close to the centre will be willing to provide most of its available bandwidth for purposes of its neighbours at 2 - 4 degrees of separation, as opposed to for its own and immediate neighbour requirements.
Posted Feb 22, 2011 6:39 UTC (Tue)
by mlinksva (guest, #38268)
[Link]
Is that a first? The closest I can think of is EFF's support for Tor, but EFF isn't mainly a think tank.
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/?pag=faq
http://dev.hinezumi.org/changeset/2338/netsukuku/
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/index.php?pag=documentation...
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom
It works pretty well from what I can see, I followed the docs and had my own small network of 2 machines functioning in a couple of hours, its an impressive project. More complete than many competing ideas...
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)
Obligitory reference to RFC 1149
to understand current observed topologies follow the money
Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)