[Cu-wireless] Information System

[Wendy Edwards]

Bryan and I had a great discussion this weekend about an information
system for the CU-Wireless network.  Essentially, we'd like to integrate
GIS and network data so that it's possible to see what's going on with the
network at a given physical location.  This could be helpful for
troubleshooting and planning, as well as general information.  For
example, it might be possible to view a map of all the nodes in a
community and see whether they were up or down, and what the traffic was
like.  This might help identify areas that needed more nodes/bandwidth.

Essentially, we'd propose a server that aggregated information.  At this
point, a single server would probably be adequate for our community, but
it would be possible to have more than one.  Nodes would periodically send
information about traffic and connectivity upstream to the aggregate
server, which could then be queried by clients.  We're considering two
different types of clients, a standalone Java application and a web-based
application.

We're looking into open-source software that we could reuse for different
parts of our application.  Here are some possibilities so far:

JUMP (with free ESRI/US Census GIS data)
http://www.vividsolutions.com/jump/

NAT Monitor
http://sourceforge.net/projects/natmonitor/
MIDAS - Monitoring Intrusion Detection, Administration System
http://midas-nms.sourceforge.net/
AirFart
http://airfart.sourceforge.net/

wlandscape - tool for collecting access point data of public
wireless networks.  Also supports gps and visualization
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wlandscape/