[Commotion-dev] convincing google to support ad-hoc mode

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On May 25, 2012, at 2:43 PM, Will Hawkins wrote:

> On 05/25/2012 02:07 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> 
>> On May 24, 2012, at 10:25 AM, L. Aaron Kaplan wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On May 24, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Sascha Meinrath wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Perhaps we should see about setting up a meeting with the Android development
>>>> team management to ensure they understand the importance of ad hoc mode for the
>>>> open source movement?
>>>> 
>>> YES!!
>>> 
>>> That would be a great contribution. 
>>> 
>>> Aaron.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> PS: while you are at it: please tell them that for good meshing we need the layer 2 parameters (RSSI, noise, SNR, biterror rate, etc.) as data readable from /proc or debugfs
>> 
>> Are these not normally exposed in Android?  I don't know much about this, so more info is needed to convince them.  Info like how to configure the kernel to support this, how common it is in other OSes (Ubuntu, Debian, etc.), potential hazards of including it, including possible privacy risks and things like that, and reasons why telecoms or manufacturers might be opposed, etc.
>> 
> 
> The WifiManager does offer some of these statistics:
> http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/WifiManager.html
> 
> In particular, it offers the developer access to RSSI values and
> provides several functions for performing calculations on those values.
> 
> I agree with Aaron's point that the more data we have about the signal
> strength the better the mesh routing will be. Pushing the devs to add
> functionality to the WifiManager API to get additional statistics seems
> like a good thing :-)

Sounds useful for sure, but lower priority than ad-hoc support.  I propose we start out only talking with Google about Ad-hoc to get a focused effort on that, then as things unfold, bring up other useful things like this.  I think we'll have to approach this way to ensure Ad-hoc actually happens, we might only have very limited attention from Google.

.hc