Cerebro: Scalable presence information

[Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos]

Announcing "Cerebro" - http://cerebro.mit.edu

Cerebro is a scalable, light-weight protocol that allows 802.11b/g 
devices to form a mesh network. Cerebro has the following advantages:

- It provides presence information about 100 nodes using only a single 
frame per 10 seconds, per node.
- It runs on _any_ 802.11b/g device (tested on XO, Ubuntu, Nokia N800)
- It can (but not yet) provide routing information within the mesh 
network that is formed by regular wifi devices.

Demo:

http://lyme.media.mit.edu:8000/

The simulation running here shows 50 simulated nodes and a real one 
(shown in the center of the screen). The nodes within the same group are 
all in range with each other, but each group is not in range with other 
groups. As a result, nodes within the same group are placed close 
together, whereas different groups are placed as far apart as possible. 
All nodes have information about presence and distance for every other 
node.


There are 50 nodes simulated in 8 groups of 5 nodes and 1 group of 10 
nodes. Although the presence algorithm scales quite well, the 
visualization does not scale as well (yet :-). Therefore, only the first 
20 nodes are displayed properly, while the rest are simply put in the 
list on the right.


A sugarized version of the UI will follow soon!

Enjoy!

Pol


-- 
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
Graduate student
Viral Communications
MIT Media Lab
Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/