Activists creating decentralized mesh network that can't be blocked, filtered or silenced

[marthter]

On 12-02-24 10:42 AM, Anthony Verevkin wrote:
>> From: "Thomas Milne"<thomas.bruce.milne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
>> I would LOVE to be part of building something like this, anyone know of
>> anything like this locally?
>>
>> http://goo.gl/7Vnua
> I was thinking about this kind of setup earlier and I would also like
> to be a part of something like that. However I can see some serious
> issues here:
>
> 1. Bandwidth. These guys are probably using 802.11g, 54Mbit, 2.4GHz. This
> standard allows for 3 independent radio channels with maximum effective
> bandwidth of 20Mbit each. 3 channels would be enough to create a basic mesh
> so it's OK. If you upgrade to 802.11n but stay within one channel and still
> have only one antenna (not using MIMO), your nominal bandwidth would be
> 75Mbit, taking you to effective 30-40Mbit per channel, shared and
> half-duplex, not to mention unstable.
>
> Provided that this is a mesh network and this becomes the maximum bandwidth
> even in the bottleneck points (which turn out to become ``backbone''), I
> would state that this network would not be good enough to allow web browsing.
> As if only you allow users to browse the web, here comes youtube and the
> whole network dies. But who wants the network without http nowadays?
>
> 2. Access to the roofs. Homeowners have the best access to put the antenna.
> But also they are the ones with the worst antenna position, low above the
> ground. People living in the hi-rise buildings either rent or are bound by
> the condo rules that make it difficult to put the antenna in the best spot.
>
> 3. Internet access. The mesh network is a good way to interchange the
> information, but the traffic should flow into the Big Internet at some point.
> Toronto FreeNET probably might be a gateway for such a mesh network, but
> then again they become the ISP. Yes, they do peer at TorIX, and the mesh
> network would make the last mile free from Bell, but still Toronto FreeNET
> is and ISP which abides the regulations. And what if you want to have the
> alternative ISP? How you would balance between them? Would you put the BGP
> full table into the mesh network? Well, the first Linksys router in the
> chain is simply gonna die right away.
>
> 4. Ease of use. Is it going to be a network for all people or the network
> ``for geeks only''? Network for all people should have the ease of connecting
> (the end point should not be a part of the mesh, rather just connect to a
> hub of the mesh network). This network would also need to have some phone
> support service. If we are about to build the ``geeks only'' network,
> this is fun thing as well, but the distance between the geeks in the city
> might be a fun-breaker.
>
> So this is a nice thing to do, but it has a lot of caveats. If you have an
> idea of how to overcome this, I'd be happy to join you.
>
> Regards,
> Anthony
I was looking into this a few months ago for a different (work related) 
purpose.  I didn't get so far as to set up any tests (couldn't really 
find the "download here" link if I recall, or even download source.tgz).

Anyway, this might be useful or at least worth further investigation, in 
the current context.  Basically a glorified sneaker net, or moped net, 
but with small changes to the apps you get fairly usable wikis, e-mail, etc.

    Abstract

    TierStore is a distributed filesystem that simplifies the
    development and deployment of applications in challenged network
    environments, such as those in developing regions. For effective
    support of bandwidth-constrained and intermittent connectivity, it
    uses the Delay Tolerant Networking store-and-forward network overlay
    and a publish/subscribe-based multicast replication protocol.
    TierStore provides a standard filesystem interface and a
    single-object coherence approach to conflict resolution which, when
    augmented with application-specific handlers, is both sufficient for
    many useful applications and simple to reason about for programmers.
    In this paper, we show how these properties enable easy adaptation
    and robust deployment of applications even in highly intermittent
    networks and demonstrate the flexibility and bandwidth savings of
    our prototype with initial evaluation results.


http://static.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/demmer/demmer_html/
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/index.php?title=Home
http://citris-uc.org/research/projects/tierstore

Cheers.

Martin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20120225/4457cb74/attachment.html>