[CUWiN-Dev] SoC ideas

[Chase Phillips]

1 Create a scheme for harvesting and publicizing node data

    Community wireless networks are frequently created based largely on
    volunteer effort.  As nodes in a CUWiN-based mesh are set up, there
    is no automatic data publication or harvesting that happens that gives
    network implementors a vision of their network's size, its strengths
    and weaknesses, and where future volunteer effort should be spent.
    Any effort to create this list is purely manual.

    Implement a central authority for a wireless "cloud" that receives
    node status updates.  The authority will receive reports sent by a
    daemon on each node which you will also implement.  This project is
    less overall work than "Configuration information store" or they could
    be combined if a team of students chose to work together.

2 Implement a testing system for CUWiN's routing protocol and metric

    CUWiN networks use HSLS (hazy-sighted link state) as a routing
    protocol to determine how the network is laid out.  Among other
    information, this protocol provides a way for node A to know how to
    talk to node C by finding out that both A and C can talk to node B.
    Each node has a "map" of the network and uses that to update its local
    routing table.

    As the network grows in size, the protocol can succomb to scaling and
    complexity issues.  The daemon that implements the protocol and metric
    can succomb to software bugs and performance problems.  Since no test
    harness currently exists to test our HSLS implementation for bugs or
    for its capabilities, most of our testing happens in the field and
    under uncontrolled circumstances.

    Implement a test harness for our HSLS implementation that will
    demonstrate CUWiN's current capabilities and provides an environment
    to validate the software we issue to community wireless networks.

    The test harness should allow us to set conditions on testing to
    ensure certain pre-existing environments work as expected and for
    attempting to create reproduceable test cases in this lab.  We should
    also be able to use it for testing other routing protocols to compare
    their performance as network size and configurations grow.  (For
    example, other routing protocol implementations can be found in the
    quagga daemon which is included on a CUWiN node.)

Chase