[Commotion-dev] Guardian Project Summary of DC Work Days

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I wrote up a summary of the past Thursday and Friday work session for the
Guardian teams, I thought I'd also post it here, for anyone who is interested:

https://code.commotionwireless.net/projects/commotion/wiki/Hackday-DC-desktop-devs

Bradley Greenwood and Josh Steiner of Scal.io, together with David Oliver and
Hans-Christoph Steiner of Guardian Project, spent two days working at New
America Foundation/OTI's DC office.  They are wrapping up their "DR1" release
of the router software, so this meeting was basically a kick-off meeting for a
full push on getting mesh support on desktop and mobile.  This is building
upon the work we initially did on the Android client, and then continued on
GNU/Linux NetworkManager and Mac OS X.  Scal.io is taking on a preliminary
round on Windows.  There was also some discussion on the feasibility of an iOS
app.

OTI has been recently focusing on building up test infrastructure and a couple
small real world deployments, focused on community wifi.  While community wifi
is not Guardian Project's interest in Commotion, it will provide valuable
experience for all of the potential uses for mesh.  They have also been
working with a university lab to building up amazing infrastructure for
testing real world wifi/mesh conditions, with a giant scriptable system for
moving around real devices like Android phones and Windows laptops around
static mesh nodes.  This will provide the first public test data that I know
of that address situations that align directly with Guardian Project
(protests, impromptu networks, etc).

We managed to mostly nail down a plan to get the Android MeshTether client
deployed to as many devices as possible.  We came up with a two stage plan:
spend a week polishing what we have, and get it into the Play Store ASAP.
Then build upon the sketch for the official adhoc support API, while also
providing a new, improved adhoc mode framework for supporting older devices.
Lastly, OTI has taken on lobbying Google directly to get adhoc mode fully
supported in Android.  We've already had promising feedback and are working to
deliver a concrete plan to be approved by Google.

The next big step at OTI is to figure out ideas about a "Commotion API" which
would provide an easy way to build network applications that take advantage of
the unique  features a mesh can provide.  There are two core pieces to this:
locality inherent to mesh, and delay-resistant networking.

For locality, its easy to control the reach of a network service, in terms of
physical space, by limiting how many hops the network traffic is allows to go:
1 hop is people in the same room, 3 hops would be neighbors, 4 hops would be a
neighborhood, etc.

As for Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN), this is a specific new network
protocol, different than TCP or UDP, so for it to be useful, an app would need
to have a DTN mode that is based on the DTN API.  While its technically
possible to use DTN transparently via TCP/IP, its not currently useful for a
variety of reasons.

.hc



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