Hello Mario,

I have been planning to do something almost exactly like this.  Using IPv6
is smart because so much work has already been done for you.  Technically
the hardest part is coming up a good routing scheme and inter routing
communication protocol for communicating neighbor nodes (maybe existing
communication protocols are good enough?).  Wireless networks of this sort
are likely to be a cross between traditional internet style nets and Ad-hoc
networks.  I've been working on a protocol that is a mix of greedy
geographic routing, link state and distance vector.  The protocol involves
talking to neighbors to get information about the local world.  With this
information it should be possible make intelligent best effort routing
choices.  GPSR is a good starting point but probably not enough for the
kinds of topologies to be expected.

What function are you planning to use to map lat/long to IPv6 address?  At
least two reasonable schemes have been put forth.  I am currently designing
around the proposal by Hain:
http://www.globecom.net/ietf/draft/draft-hain-ipv6-pi-addr-02.html.  It
makes a lot of sense because it leaves the bottom 64 bits free for the MAC
address making DHCP easier to implement.  (DHCP in IPv6, seems weird but
useful for roaming coffeeshop users)  An alternate scheme uses more bits for
each positional element, and even encodes elevation information but leaves
only 24 bits for the machine identifier on the network.
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~leonard/essay/geographic.html  This would require
doing traditional trickery to map MAC address to IP like hashing or keeping
a database (to ensure getting the same address each time).  I think the
second scheme is more appropriate for military sensors and nano-particles,
but not community networks.

I read through your website.  How do you plan to write this in Java?  I'm a
big Java fan and long time programmer but I think it will be infeasible in
the long run because Java runs in user space, thus take a huge performance
hit.  It might be possible to write all of the interrouter communication in
java but eventually the routing itself will probably have to be done in the
kernel.  I was considering using the click router from MIT:
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/click/   It's very modular and has built in
functions for traffic shaping, packet modification, IPv6, ethernet, etc and
its easy to write new modules. What do you think?

I've gotten quite a bit of resistance from people asking me why they would
want an alternative network.  Since I can't come up with a way to convice
them, I have stopped trying.  But even as a research only project I think
this is fascinating.  It puts a whole new dimension to what is possible with
these little commodity wifi cards.

We can probably take this conversation offline but I wanted to echo my
interest to the group at large.  Does anyone else share this vision of an
alternative network?  Think it is useless or totally infeasible?

JJ Furman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mario Giammarco" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 6:08 AM
Subject: [BAWUG] New GPL routing software


> Hello,
> I am developing a GPL routing software for wireless networks.
>
> If you are interested look at scrouter.sourceforge.net.
>
> It is almost finished, but I need some feedback or (better) some help.
>
> Thank you for the interest.
>
> --
> Mario Giammarco
> Via Calamandrei,5-48022 Lugo (RA) ITALY
> tel: +39054522965 cell: +39(0)3284146845
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> --
> general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/>
> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless

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