[Commotion-dev] Current state on handsets

[Paul Fuxjaeger]

hi all,

can someone in here shed some light on the current state of adhoc-mode 
and olsrd/batmand on smartphones (for android-platform mostly I guess?).

1) On how many models is it known to work at all currently?
2) How much effort is it to make it work?
3) Are there ways to enable it WITHOUT breaking any other 
functionalities on the smartphone if installed?


paul






PS: the reason for asking is:

We thought that the upcoming loooong series of street protests (because 
of acta and it's yet unborn siblings) here in europe/anywhereelse 
provide a nice testbed situation:

During protest there are:
1) lots of technically inclined people with latest gen rooted/jailbroken 
smartphones in close physical proximity.
2) the prospect of helping to test if adhoc nets can spontaneously 
emerge will probably spark interest
3) protest events typically last for 2-4 hours each, thus energy 
efficiency problems (battery runtime) can be largely ignored at this stage
4) those protests all have a general "we want to keep our networks out 
of central control" subtext - perfect fit for the occasion.

We think that it does not really matter yet if these "networks" (they 
probably cannot stabilize anyhow, routingtable-wise) can be used for 
something useful at all - it is more about the fun of 
observing/participating. Just seeing some small partitioned network 
graphs as they spontaneously emerge/breakdown is enough. Form our point 
of view, it would certainly add some entertainment-bonus while we walk 
these long protest walks.

Currently, what we typically do while being there in the streets (appart 
from chanting and chatting with friends face2face) is using centralized 
twitter/facebook APIs on top of cellular networks controlled by large 
corporations. Although these tools are working fine and seem to be 
passing along messages unfiltered, there are many reasons to start 
questioning if this will stay like that.