[CUWiN-Dev] introduction from new member in South Africa

[David Johnson]

Hi all cu-wireless developers 
 
My name is David Johnson, I work at the Meraka institute  (www.meraka.org.za) which is part of the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research www.csir.co.za) in South Africa. I am a researcher looking at ways to remove barriers to bottom up creation of telecommunications infrastructure in developing communities around South Africa and the rest of Africa. Phew that was a mouthful - ok I'm really a technie at heart and I have been playing with wireless networking for about 5 years now and programming well since I was at school - cut my teeth on an Apple II writing Applesoft basic and machine language programs. 
 
We have been experimening with mesh networking for about a year now. We have a number of testbed wireless networks up and running - one which runs in my home town in Pretoria South Africa, which consists of about 14 nodes and connects my house to my office and other work colleagues, and one installed in a rural area 300km east of Pretoria (about 8 nodes) - which has been talked about in some articles - mainly because we used a cantenna to connect a house : 
  
http://www.linux.co.za/linux/view/linux/en/page12994?oid=14611&sn=Detail  
http://www.csir.co.za/plsql/ptl0002/PTL0002_PGE038_ARTICLE?ARTICLE_NO=7298999 
 
Our Pretoria WiFi network (spanning about a 30km radius area) is really a hub and spoke with mesh networks being built off the spokes. The Long range links consist of 2-radio soekris boxes running FreeBSD and Quagga for routing running RIP (these are installed on high sites like water towers). Houses then mesh off these water towers with single-radio linksys WRT54G boxes running OLSR to do the mesh. 
 
Currenly we have only experimented with mobilemesh, OLSR and some AODV ... last year one of my colleagues downloaded your HSLS based image and ran it - it worked well - but we never got to doing any installations with it. 
 
We are very excited now to start testing some of your latest firmware and do some trial installations. We would also like to get involved in development looking at porting to other platforms that we use such as VIA boards and the Linksys WRT54G board. We are also very comfortable will Soekris - this has been our longest standing platform of choice for the last 6 years (We have actually been involved with WiFi before it was even called that - we originally worked with Lucent WaveLAN cards - they were huge things about 30cm long.) 
 
We would like to look at VIA mini-ITX boards because they  seem to be the cheapest PC platform (with built in VGA, sound etc.) at the moment and have great potential to be used as a low cost PC platform in rural areas and naturally we would want to mesh enable these. The Linksys platform seems to be the cheapest wireless router at the moment so it is also a natural choice for us. 
 
We are also in the process of setting up a 50 node indoor mesh testbed (should be up and running this week) using VIA mini-ITX boards. We would probably want to look at porting your firmware to this first. 
 
We have a very good team of about 5 developers both on Linux and FreeBSD. One of my colleagues (John Hay) is a major contributor to FreeBSD - he freaks me out sometimes - he slaps together drivers for unsupported hardware in a day or two. He was also instrumental in putting together the Soekris wireless routers running freeBSD - he mostly uses Atheros based Wifi cards now. 
 
I will send you our website dedicated to this work as soon as we have finished doing some maintenance on it 
 
Any ideas where we should start if we wnat to do porting to VIA and Linksys? 
 
Regards 
 

David Johnson
Meraka Institute
CSIR South Africa
Phone: +27 12 8414266
Fax: +27 12 8414829
Address: PO Box 395, Pretoria, 0001




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