

Communities experimenting with mesh networks - carybeta
http://technical.ly/2015/04/06/12-communities-experimenting-mesh-networks/

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padobson
Does anyone have any opinions on how this could grow to replace traditional
ISPs? What's the difference between a mesh network and just putting a big
WiMax antenna up in my neighborhood and giving everyone free internet access?

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joepie91_
The idea of a meshnet is that, as the name implies, it's a _mesh_. It usually
involves intelligent rerouting over other peers if a previous route is no
longer available.

If you were to put up a big WiMax antenna, you are the single point of failure
- you could spy on the traffic, you could banish specific clients, and if you
were to disappear, everybody in your neighbourhood would be without internet.

A mesh network allows none of these (in theory), because there is not one
single point of control.

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superuser2
Mesh is a topology, not a belief system. A mesh network can still be
administered by one entity who can monitor traffic, manage configuration, and
restrict access to authorized users, but they would do so using a distributed
system rather than the control panel of a single piece of equipment.

It's different from what you describe in that a typical WiMax antenna setup
mirrors the star topology typical with network switches. Clients are connected
to a piece of infrastructure, which is in turn connected to a larger piece of
infrastructure, and so on up the tree.

In a mesh network, clients are connected to each other without using
infrastructure as an intermediary. Every node relays traffic for its
neighbors, and you reach distant points by hopping through many of your
neighbors (or you don't, if they don't happen to currently be arranged in a
way that facilitates that).

A good mesh network system has intelligent routing algorithms that are some
combination of fault-tolerant, efficient at finding the shortest path,
equitable in distributing load, and designed well in terms of incentive
structure (so that people do not freeload by acting as clients but not
relays).

If you are using a mesh network to reach the internet, you are still dependent
on the nodes that route between the mesh network and an actual ISP, which
presumably pay for the privilege and want to recoup costs somehow. However, it
can be a decent way for a community to roll its own last-mile infrastructure,
provided it can purchase wholesale transit somewhere within the mesh, and
drive enough participation that there is sufficient capacity between you and
the backhaul most of the time.

The more interesting uses are for meshes that are not (mostly) about Internet
access. There is experimental work on protocols for messaging and durable
document storage/publication (think Wikipedia but without web servers) that
work well on meshes, providing pretty good internet-like capabilities to areas
where access to the actual Internet is impractical. (Some of this is embedded
in OLPC/XO).

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java-man
What I think might contribute to success of mesh networks as ISP alternatives
is incorporation of micropayments for bandwidth/storage into the system.

There should be an incentive for individuals to participate. A thread of
catastrophic communication system failure (as in case of a natural disaster)
is not enough to stimulate the deployment. But the promise of income is.

Would you be inclined to install a mesh node if it gave you a small income
stream?

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Cloudy
How would the income system work? (..cryptocoins?)

What goods/services can people buy with your "income stream" system?

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java-man
Storage, bandwith, voice.

The problem, I think, is distributed accounting - in the presence of untrusted
and malicious nodes. Micropayment transactions need to work faster than
existing systems like BTC, to be able to support fast call set up, for
example.

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mark_l_watson
I love this stuff.

I am taking a good Coursera course "Fog Networks and the Internet of Things"
that covers edge networks. I am also planning on including a section "IoT and
Edge Fog Networks" in my new book I am writing.

There is a lot that can be done at the edge (collecting and processing local
data, sharing computational resources, etc.) without needing LTE/core or the
cloud.

