Feral Jundi

Friday, October 2, 2009

PMC 2.0: Mesh Networks

   This is important research for PMC’s and PSC’s, because if companies want a simple way for contractors to communicate with each other on some disaster zone or war zone gig, then this will allow them to do that.  Especially since most guys have, or will soon have smart phones that are bluetooth and wifi capable. You could add this capability to your communications plan, and if these guys can make this open source and free, then it would be a no-brainer to utilize Mesh Networks.

   In disaster zones and war zones where there is no infrastructure for 3G or cell towers, or those things were destroyed somehow, you must have a communications infrastructure back up system.  Mesh Networks is a possible solution if they can pull it off.  To make it free is even cooler, because then it will not be something that is exclusive to one company or another.  Along with the Mesh Networks, there must also be a way to encrypt the communications or something, and I am sure some technology will come along to do such a thing.  But first things first–get the Mesh Networks going.

    And for military/police/medical/disaster response crews, this will be awesome. For coordinating purposes and for evolving incidents like the Mumbai attack, you must have communications and information sharing systems that have redundancy built into them. If terrorists or some flood destroys the cell tower(s), then you must have an alternative network for everyone to talk on.  This is smart and I wish them all the luck in their research. –Matt

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Researchers developing free mobile mesh network

Munir Kotadia

Oct 1, 2009

Can provide comms during mobile network blackout?

Researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information including high quality video.

The mesh network will make use of Bluetooth or Wifi and could be used at a large sporting event, conference, or even a crowded city centre during an emergency, to swap information between handsets – even if the mobile phone network was offline.

Researchers from National ICT Australia (NICTA) and Singapore’s A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) hope to demonstrate the technology within two years, according to the NICTA project leader Roksana Boreli.

One key benefit of such a technology would be that users sharing content between their devices would use the wireless capabilities already built into their phones and not bandwidth from their mobile provider, so the data exchange would be free.

At this stage, Dr Boreli told iTnews that the researchers are trying to overcome technical issues such as how to establish a trusted connection between the devices. Once the technical issues have been solved, its uses are only limited by the imagination of the users, she said.

“This is an early stage in the research project. We are addressing how you would quickly establish trust between devices, how you would discover them and [use them to] share information.

“You can be quite free in dreaming up the services or applications to put on top of it because if you enable content sharing from multiple sources at the same time, and you do it complementing the existing network, it opens up new services,” said Dr Boreli.

One potential scenario could be during an emergency where the mobile phone network was unavailable or clogged. In a city centre users could set up the network to share information, video, photographs and, depending on the final client applications, even locate friends and loved ones.

“If you think of this as a totally unstructured mesh. It is not pre-planned or pre-organised, there is no authentication of nodes, technically speaking. Even though you have wireless connections between nodes, there is nothing pre-planned and the network just forms. It would work very well in very crowded events,” she said.

Another potential scenario, according to Dr Boreli, could be a sporting event such as a major tennis tournament.

“For example, multiple tennis courts, where you definitely cannot see all [the courts] at the same time,” said Dr Boreli.

She explained that the event organisers could invite people to join the network and share videos from other courts or content could be created by the users themselves to provide a “360 degree YouTube video with multiple sources”.

Dr Boreli said users wanting to join the network could do so using a simple application on their phone. However, she said for now, the researchers are focussed on getting the technology to work rather than the uses that it could be put to.

Story here.

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