Mongolian Wireless Mesh

So you think you can make an unlimited node wireless mesh, think again. Check out what happen in Mongolia.

New to Wireless Mesh

From time to time I get people asking for help with wireless mesh. Although I have written many DIY articles or even provide suggestion on how to fix problems I still get the person looking for my expertise. Most of them just need help to get started. With all the people out there willing to offer help on open source wireless mesh; getting started should be pretty easy. But with many options in introductory documents and easy-to-install distributions, choosing a place to start can be the hard part.

Where to Find Support

Picking a distribution gets a lot less challenging when you remember to choose based on where you plan to go for help. Your local user group mailing list will be a lot more useful when other members know the locations and utilities you're talking about. Just subscribe to your local user group mailing list, and lurk for a while to find out what distribution the most helpful people their use. Then pick up a good wireless mesh distro, burn an install CD, and jump in.

There is lots of useful online documentation for specific tasks. But so far, books offer the best introductions to basic concepts such as file permissions or working with the shell. Oops what there are no Wireless Mesh Books for open source mesh? So you have to investigate what the Linux distribution is and then looking for the distribution's name in the title of your first Linux book can be a time and frustration saver for new users. Instead of telling you to do things this way on one distribution, that way on another, or worse, telling you to find things for yourself, a book that concentrates on one distribution can point you straight to the file, tool or feature you need. Ok so if there aren’t any books then you should know at least the Linux kernel you are about to use. Most open source projects have a catch many of the participants in user groups and mailing lists that offer the best help for new users.

Mainstream Linux Advantages

Part of Locustworld's popularity among user group members is because it nails down many of the best system administration practices. A new user who installs Locustworld and does things the Locustworld way will find him or she acting in many ways like a cautious, experienced Network Administrator without realizing it. Now, using Moskaluk.com you can get a thorough while still drawing on the author's long experience with old-school Unix and older Linux environments to cover the basics that haven't changed.

Top Tools Putty & Winscp

One tool that gets too little coverage in most Locustwold for new users is OpenSSH. As the administrator of network node, you'll use it for all kinds of remote administration tasks.

I hope this helps but you can also google for Locustworld documentation

The challenge of Video Conference

Oh back in 2001 I wrote a Master Thesis on the Challenge of Video Conference . Now this paper was inspire by the type of work I did in 90's. Lately I have seen a lot of people downloading this paper and I assume it was students. Now the paper is full of politics and technical observations regarding Video Conference.

A number of years previous to that paper I was running an IT department for a major software company in the US. In the Canadian division we had 5 locations of which two where used for development. At that time we used Frame Relay to connect the two offices together. The offices were hundreds of kilometres apart. What I did was to setup using Net meeting a video conference between both locations. These were simple cameras at that time and each conference room in each city had a work station that would broadcast a Net meeting. So if you can image walking into a room and see your staff on the video it was like talking to Max Headroom.

Since we had the luxury of having two dedicated meeting rooms with video conferencing, I noticed that my staff would hang out in these two rooms all day. They would bring in there laptops and talk between cities as if they were talking between two people.

The synergy that this created was the feeling of having one team. As the company expanded a second location was added and I add the video conference to a fairly large server room. Again my staff took to it and felt like having a video conference 8 hours a day 5 days week was starting to be a good thing. Friendships started to form and I really thought that this was the wave of the future. I thought that everyone was doing this in there companies. First yes people are having video conference but not 8 hours a day. Second now with bandwidth constrains this would be extremely costly today.

Now the connection between the sites was limited to bandwidth and because we only used the bandwidth for very large file transfer off hours and for email and surfing we utilized the bandwidth for communication.

Since that time I have worked in a number of different location and nobody had used video conference as room extension. Most video conferences are either for only short conversations or meetings. Most people who never even dream of having video conference call 5 days a week i.e. always on.

Now my youngest son had a video camera on his PC and from time to time he has video call with his friends as they play an on line game. What I noticed is that they too use the room as extension to the other person house. The bandwidth is now compressed and video and voice is very good.

Ok so you probably at this time asking what this has to do with wireless Mesh, well, I don't know. Ok I do know. Many Wireless Mesh Companies provide cameras to their Wireless Mesh maybe for security or webcast or what ever. It's an extension of the area they covering. Most of the time it is boring and nothing to see other than a bird flying towards the camera. These cameras are on for 24 hours, 7 days a week 365 days a week. That is impressive. The cost to run this minor. Today in Canada a few cell phone companies are providing video conference through their client cell phone. This too is impressive but costly. Most people would not have a conference call on the cell phone for over 5 minutes. It would be cost prohibitive.

Can Video Conference run on a Mesh 24-7? You bet. Can you now imagine the social implication of have a permanent Video Conference running on a wireless mesh? Awesome.

Can you imagine taking a flat panel TV and adding a video conference component and living it on so that you can watch you buddy from his house? That was outrageous but Extreme Video Conferencing is coming to a mesh near you.

VM images for Locustworld

First thing I should apologies for this blog as it was written in the middle of night and at the time I thought it was brilliant, now I reread it, what the hell was I thinking. I’ll let you decide.

The basis of the ideas is to get Locustworld off dedicated computers and start running them under VMware. Now this is not the brilliant part but because of the small storage and frame it would make a wonderful VMware image. As you know I use Locustworld OS to run my wireless mesh network. The opportunity is to have Locustworld software imbedded into applications. You know like Wireless Mesh 2.0.

But first a little history, my first experience with Locustworld was booting off a CD and having it run on a ram disk. Now VMware is not your daddy’s RAMdisk. I thought that this setup was brilliant in the fact that you could operate it from any machine; however, this wasn’t case. The RAMdisk did not perform well and I’m not sure anyone used it.

VMware with Locustworld would be great for a number of reasons. The first is to have less equipment especially for uplink nodes. Having Locustworld embedded into various network applications and other application would not only be truly great it would also have QOS write to the application server. This was brilliant part. I know, I know I will work on my idea a little more.

So what does this all mean? Well imagine you have a small town and let’s call it Smalltown. And in this town we have say a town of savy Computer people. Now the town has been around for about 100 years and the infrastructure is dated, especially telecommunication, TV, etc. So the town people got together and said lets invest into a wireless mesh network, and they did (could this be Bigtown MUNI mesh?) They put wireless nodes up and were able to put uplink nodes everywhere. Smalltown people were very happy. They could get access to internet from every part of the town.

Now Smalltown people where very wise and ensure that they had all security setup and people also had bandwidth controls. But the demand for bandwidth was growing. The problem was not the wireless mesh network but the uplink nodes acting as funnels to the internet. Smalltown people want to act like the Bigtown people so they bought more bandwidth and soon they realized that they two were like Bigtown people with Bigtown problems. They had all the problem of Bigtown web 2.0.

Now the Smalltown people thought they can too setup some services like Bigtown web 2.0 people by providing some local services. New services like VoIP (telephony) started and Smalltown Telephone Company started. Then a new company start IPTV too started to provide services with in Smalltown Mesh. Then some of the town people started to build their own web commerce site and too have mesh access. But the town did not have many resources. The Smalltown had PC’s and they access wireless mesh cloud. They wanted more bandwidth for their little wireless mesh.

But the Smalltown couldn’t afford to put in more wireless nodes. So they ask for people to donate their old computers to build up the network and have more channels available to use. Smalltown were savvy people and never junked their old computers. They used them to play Pong with. So they thought if they all could share a bit of their computer resources with everyone that the can setup a virtual network. Well let’s call it VMware Network. They could use there machines as next layer of network having more paths and bandwidth. Now Smalltown had the same problem like Bigtown in which many different operating systems and hardware where used. So they used VMplayers in each machine and setup a new mesh cloud.

So if you can imagine that PC’s could run Locustworld in VMware that a whole new type of network could start from existing equipment. Secondary Mesh network not only within the immediate premise like a personal area network (PAN) but extended to other neighbors as well.

So you can have a PAN with in your home or business connecting to main wireless mesh. That means person application can be hosted with in the town. This distributed model is very different from what we have today. Most hosting companies have 7 by 24 total redundant systems. Even if a mini host facility was added to this system the VMware using Locustworld could be brought in for QOS.

Could the VMware Locustworld be the next wind farm for the farmers (PBS special on co-op wind farms and the benefit to the agricultural community?)

Sorry this is where the ideal or dream became a little weird. Hmm, VMware for Locustworld? I think it time for something like this to happen. It could be Wireless Mesh 2.0

Where is my N

Ok for years now when someone first came out with idea of 802.11N standard I thought this would really help the Wireless Mesh. Just imagine over 300 MBPS meshing together. Oh the thought and reality was awesome. Well I was very close last spring (2007) when I order my 802.11N radio cards. I thought I was on my way the cards have been delayed for over 8 months now. Now a few have made it to market place but the performance has not been that great (so I have been told.) So what is the hold up? Could it be that the performance that we are promised is not being delivered? Naw I think it because of a little company in Canada called Wi-LAN.

This company has been around for a long time and has been creating and buying various patents. “The 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n standards all use Wi-LAN's patented W-OFDM technology and/or Wi-LAN's patented MC-DSSS technology. Even though in 1999, several industry leaders came together to form a global organization, now known as the Wi-Fi Alliance which develops universal specifications and follows through with certification of Wi-Fi wireless devices, based on technical standards developed by the IEEE 802.11 Working Group.” Wi-LAN 2008

Although the WiFi Alliance came up with the standard 802.11n (MIMO overlay on hybrid OFDM/DSSS-based PHY) is owned by Wi-LAN. Now this is really not a big deal for manufacturers all they need to do is license the technology and way they go. But wait Wi-LAN is going after all these companies who produce these products and are using litigation to get compensated. May the delays are not just performance but litigation? Check out there main web page they have item called Litigation. Wow that the first time I seen that.
So wait some more and pay a few more bucks, but the wait will be worth it!

Wireless Mesh 2.0 Goals

Creating and collecting network data and mining this data could be one of the goals of Wireless Mesh 2.0 is the production of OS and software which can improve itself. Such software can learn from experience and adapt to changing situations and requirements. In addition, such software can refine its knowledge base, perhaps leading to a level of expertise beyond that of human experts. Should wireless mesh become a knowledge-based program that uses a machine learning technique, Knowledge-based Learning, in the domain of Network Traffic Control. Should Wireless Mesh 2.0 tasks be to maximize call completion in an integrated wireless and circuit-switched telecommunications network? Wireless Mesh 2.0 could learn from its own experiences and by observing the actions of other nodes (mesh access points.) Wireless Mesh 2.0 is one of the components of Integrated Learning System, which contains implementations of several learning paradigms working together to improve problem-solving performance. Will Wireless Mesh 2.0 combines two machine learning paradigms: Explanation-Based Learning and Empirical Learning. Naw

Check out more wireless blog

Tex has been doing amazing things for years and every time I said that I'm working on something Tex has done it. Check out his blog http://wirelessworlds.blogspot.com/

It amazing how many people are working on similar projects.

Oh Tex I thinking of adding AI to the wireless mesh, I think he has already done that too.

Wireless Mesh Networking 2.0

You knew this was coming, yeah I thought I would write something before the commercial wireless community started to pitch something that actually was nothing. You know what I mean, in open source community you see that many application started to use open source i.e. Video, VoIP, etc. Now you see that there are a lot of machine networks such as sensor networks etc., where wireless mesh is used to gather information in a geographically broad region. Now setting up what wireless Mesh Networking 2.0 should be like mash up and the initial Web 2.0.

The phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, and wikis, — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs. According to Tim O'Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Web 2.0 not only became a buzz world it also create other 2.0 type such a Government 2.0 and wife 2.0 or husband 2.0 and maybe even children 2.0 a lot of different marketing fluff. Well Wireless Mesh Networking 2.0 should not be fluff but a framework to mash up wireless mesh to benefit Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 i.e. private sector vs. public sector.

So if Wireless Mesh Networking was client based i.e. mesh was used to deliver networking from and to the internet will Mesh 2.0 be server or machine based? Having information being collaborated and shared between Meshian’s? Ok so we’ve done that with wireless Mesh 1.0. Mesh 2.0 has to be bigger than that. Wireless Mesh does not need to be a simple municipal solution or broadband client solution, it needs to grow up first and compete with its wired counter parts i.e. Ethernet, fibre, etc. Wireless Mesh Networking 2.0 needs bandwidth, and once it competes with it wired brother then we can talk about 2.0 or the next generation or social networking or what ever.

No I think Open Source Wireless Mesh should blend in artificial intelligence (AI) components other components that truly make it a living network. Maybe Wireless Mesh 2.0 should be a “Living Network.” You know decision mechanisms that are based on artificial neural network capable of finding patterns, and learning traffic routing on the network. Ok so this ain’t a living breathing item but can you imagine that network giving recommendation of where and how to manipulate it self and position itself to move internet traffic? Naw.

Happy 2008

So this 2008

Well this is 2008 and we are still meshin'. I came across a post for soekris board installation of Locustworld wireless mesh http://www.markw.net/ I hope this becomes another good resource for your DIY.

Happy New Year!