blog/draft/2013-mesh-network-oslo.txt

   1 Title: Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
   2 Tags: english, nuug
   3 Date: 2013-10-11 17:10
   4
   5 <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
   6 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
   7 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
   8 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
   9 successful examples like
  10 <ahref="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
  11 <ahref="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
  12 (see
  13 <ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
  14 for a large list) around the globe.  A nice overview of the Kiel
  15 Freifunk community can be seen from their
  16 <ahref="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
  17 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh notes
  18 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
  19 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
  20 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
  21
  22 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now within the
  23 <ahref="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community,
  24 but my recent involvement in
  25 <ahref="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
  26 finally lead me to give it some priority, as I suspect a Freedombox
  27 should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family when
  28 possible, given that most communication between people are between
  29 those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
  30 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
  31 a central hub to tap into to control and listen in on the private
  32 communication of citizens, which have become more and more important
  33 over the years.</p>
  34
  35 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
  36 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
  37 <ahref="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
  38 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
  39 <ahref="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
  40 Freifunk project</a>, but this effort seem to be dead and the people
  41 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
  42 <ahref="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
  43 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update, so
  44 the project page can't be updated to point to the new project.  The
  45 people at Hackeriet have already invited people from the Freifunk
  46 community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks, and I came across this
  47 video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the speakers about their
  48 talk:</p>
  49
  50 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
  51
  52 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
  53 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
  54 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
  55 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
  56 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
  57 completely different setup, and thus this have decided to focus on
  58 batman-adv for now.  It sure help to know that the very cool
  59 <ahref="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
  60 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
  61 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
  62 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
  63 that project:
  64
  65 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
  66
  67 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
  68 <ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
  69 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
  70 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
  71 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
  72 based community mesh networks.</p>
  73
  74 </p>The batman-adv is a bit special, as it provide layer 2 (as in
  75 ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
  76 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh vlan you
  77 can bridge to or handle like any other vlan on your computer.  The
  78 required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at least since Debian
  79 Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
  80 <ahref="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
  81 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
  82 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
  83
  84 <table>
  85 <tr><th>Setting</th></th>Value</th></tr>
  86 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
  87 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
  88 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
  89 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
  90 </table>
  91
  92 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
  93 in wifi card firmware and drivers.  (See a nice post from VillageTelco
  94 about
  95 "<ahref="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
  96 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
  97 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
  98 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
  99 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
 100 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
 101
 102 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
 103 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
 104 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
 105 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
 106
 107 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
 108 us on IRC, either channel
 109 <ahref="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
 110 or <ahref="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
 111 irc.freenode.net.</p>
 112
 113 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
 114 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
 115 and Innovation called
 116 <ahref="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
 117 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
 118 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
 119 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
 120 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
 121 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
 122 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
 123 be interested in a cooperation?</p>