New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed

[John Watlington]

Poly,
     In theory, your suggestion sounds good.   In practice, I think
it is advanced research winning out over fixing real problems.

     In the spirit of testing realistic scenarios where we are currently
deployed and failing, I would instead strongly urge concentrating
on testing 70 laptops in a small space (no larger than 1CC's devel
area) with two WiFi access points.

This may not help the mesh routing work immediately, but it would
help us verify why teachers in Uruguay are complaining about an
inability to connect.

It would also allow testing of realistic methods of automatically
becoming an MPP.  As Michail has rightfully pointed out and
Uruguay and Peru have been requesting, we need a way
of extending the WiFi network in the school out to the village.

I don't see us getting far enough along with changes to mesh
routing, or replacing parts of salut with cerebro in time for the
8.2 release.    But I do believe that Michail can figure out a decent
way to gate the MPP functionality by then.

The 8.2 release is the one that Peru will be using next year (2009).
It is very important that any MPP functionality that is added back
to the build be very well tested in the dense school wifi scenario
by 8.2 freeze to ensure happy customers.

wad

On Jun 6, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:

> In the spirit of escalating collaboration/communication use cases to
> more realistic scenarios, I 'd like to propose creating the following
> multihop network testbed.
>
> This testbed will involve about 70 nodes, but most are already  
> deployed
> (about 50 nodes already exist at 1CC and 8 at the Media Lab). About
> 10-12 new XOs are necessary to form the multi-hop network:
>
> http://maps.google.com/maps/ms? 
> hl=en&gl=us&ptab=2&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=116432384591811010127.00 
> 044f046ce8f6f83aae3
>
> This testbed will be used to:
>
> 1) stress communication over the mesh network; this can be as large  
> as a
> 10-hop network spanning from my apartment (Eastgate) to a friend's
> apartment in Ashdown.
>
> 2) Test collaboration using Cerebro on a mixture of devices including
> XOs, x86 machines (Linux and Windows) and mobile phones. Cerebro  
> runs on
> each one of those independently (including OpenMoko Freerunner), but
> this testbed could be used as a "backbone" network for devices that
> would otherwise be out of range (such as a mobile phone on one side of
> campus and a PC on the other).
>
>
> Action items:
> 1) secure space (especially at Infinite Corridor) to house XOs.
> 2) setup and automate software updates over the network.
> 3) last but not least, get about 10-12 XOs from OLPC ;-)
>
> Comments/additions are most welcome!
>
> Pol
>
> -- 
> Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> Graduate student
> Viral Communications
> MIT Media Lab
> Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
> http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/
>
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