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Monday, April 11, 2011

Android Mesh Networking: wouldn't this solve the Internet Kill Switch fears, the lack of coverage and emergency issues with a single rock? Why aren't more programmers behind this? : programming

Android Mesh Networking: wouldn't this solve the Internet Kill Switch fears, the lack of coverage and emergency issues with a single rock? Why aren't more programmers behind this? : programming

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[–]mutatron 25 points 1 month ago

Why do people always ask "why doesn't care?" the minute they find some new piece of info?

[–]trtocm 12 points 1 month ago

You mean, especially when there are two+ years worth of comments with plenty of rationale behind why this is a terrible idea?

[–]mutatron 4 points 1 month ago

I have no idea what you're talking about.

[–]trtocm 10 points 1 month ago

That enhancement request that OP linked to has dozens of comments from over two years with all kinds of reasons why this idea wouldn't work, and yet, he saw it, assumed he understood the complexities, and posted, incredulously, "why has no one done this"... as if to motivate us to undertake such a ridiculously large project.

[–]badsectoracula 5 points 1 month ago

Obviously, because they wonder "why doesn't care?" :-P

[–]avsa [S] 2 points 1 month ago

Maybe the phrase is burnt out, but you are correct: I was honestly wondering why sometimes I feel I'm between the few that know or care about mesh networking. Since I believe it to be a big deal, and most smart people do not care, I sometimes wonder if there's something wrong I am missing.

[–]ColdMountain 4 points 1 month ago

How about being productive instead? Start telling smart people about it, and try and convince them to help.

When some of them explain why they won't, you may find the answer to this question.

[–]avsa [S] 4 points 1 month ago

You're right I'll start doing exactly that.

[–]buncle 8 points 1 month ago

Maybe try putting a post up on reddit about it.

[–]lgeezer 1 point 1 month ago

It does not necessarily defeat the Internet kill switch: AIUI, 'bad' apps can be withdrawn, and 'bad' can mean whatever whoever's in charge wants it to mean. An effective pre-emptive measure would be to mandate the ability to temporarily brick any phone licensed for sale. It would be of use, therefore, in non-western countries, but not necessarily in the US, or UK, for instance. I agree that even geographically limited use would be better than nothing.

OTOH, as a programmer, one doesn't always want more coders -- too many cooks etc.

[–]imbcmdth 2 points 1 month ago

"why doesn't , of which I am a member, care today?" = "why didn't I care yesterday?"

[–]skulgnome 1 point 1 month ago

They'd love to have someone else implement their ideas. I'm sure you've seen this behaviour before.

[–][deleted] 5 points 1 month ago*

Do you even know how many engineers are working on it? Do you know how many groups are researching it?

The number of programmers on one task is not directly proportional to how quickly something becomes a cost effective technology that multiple hardware developers are willing to adopt as a standard...

Also, I don't want my calls and phone data routed through an ad hoc network.

[–]rdude 8 points 1 month ago

Of course people care, but mesh networking in this manner would either require specialized hardware and/or use a lot of power, and there are a huge number of difficult issues to be tackled around availability, routing, authentication, and on and on and on.

That's why most projects around mesh networking are being done as research projects by universities and such:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking#Examples

Android, a consumer operating system that tries to tackle an entire different set of challenges, isn't really the place to research and prototype this technology. Once the technology is fully baked, integrating it into Android would be a great idea, but for now it's not the place.

That said, if you feel strongly about it, Android is open source. You can fork it and use it for your own ends.

[–]dnew 2 points 1 month ago

most projects around mesh networking are being done as research projects

Well, other than the kind of project where it's already widely deployed and in use, like mesh networking with nodes attached to electric and water meters to read them and relay the data back to the utility without sending someone around to read them.

[–]rdude 7 points 1 month ago

Right, but those are pretty different. They are limited, proprietary networks and send pretty limited amounts of data. Half the issues I mentioned, such as availability and authentication, become much easier to solve or completely unnecessary in the kind of scenario you mentioned.

Trying to create a standalone all-purpose mesh network with an effectively unlimited number of nodes is much more difficult.

[–]dnew 3 points 1 month ago

Indeed! I was just pointing out that it's not like there are no mesh networks out there. There's very little in the way of middle-useful mesh networks. They're all either easy, proprietary and closed, or research projects.

[–]crashblossom 1 point 1 month ago

I'm interested in these things, and the ones i know of are NetX at the UofIllinois, and the South African Wireless User Group.

Could you just name a few more you're aware of that I could dig into?

[–]dnew 1 point 1 month ago

Honestly, I did a quick look around to see if I could remember the names, and I couldn't. It was just a part of another department of a company I used to work for dealing with that stuff and interfacing to it, along with random conversations with friends who work for utilities that use them. The best I could come up with is "it starts with a Z." Sorry. I just don't remember.

[–]crashblossom 1 point 1 month ago

haha no problem

[–]MarshallBanana 1 point 1 month ago

Half the issues I mentioned, such as availability and authentication, become much easier to solve or completely unnecessary in the kind of scenario you mentioned.

Also, power.

[–][deleted] 2 points 1 month ago

The nodes are stationary. The hard part about mobile ad-hoc networks (what you're talking about - theyre a subset of mesh networks) is the mobility.

[–]dnew 1 point 1 month ago

That's a good point, yes. :-)

[–]ex_ample 1 point 1 month ago

Android, a consumer operating system that tries to tackle an entire different set of challenges

Uh, I assume it would run as an app and use bluetooth or wifi that's already there. Power management is an issue. But having a technology that's actually in the field is a lot more useful then some research project.

[–]rdude 0 points 1 month ago

Running it as an app rather than part of the OS would make it much less useful. Imagine if "Internet" was just an app and no other apps on the phone could send or receive data.

[–]ex_ample 2 points 1 month ago

It's not an iphone, Android supports multitasking and inter-process communications. So other apps could run at the same time and hook into the mesh network.

[–]rdude 1 point 1 month ago

Yes, I've done a fair bit of Android dev. Trying to implement a mesh network as an app though would still be a dumb hack and would require a rooted phone and probably specialized hardware anyway.

The right way to do it is low-level and it's not easy.

[–]Grizzant 5 points 1 month ago

If the bgp routers are disabled then no. You would then get close to the border to talk to a canadian phone but then all the internet would have togo through that 1 link or even 1000 links...so. 100 million internet connectionsthrough 1000 phone links... So ano go.

Tl;dr...no

[–]SCombinator 3 points 1 month ago

Because they're aware of how much latency is involved. The internet is fast because it's a vast network of very fast machines and huge fiber optic pipes.

Never mind there would be very few city to city connections.

[–]RiotingPacifist 3 points 1 month ago

I spent a while thinking about a similar thing ultimatly the problem is that unless the internet kill switch is activated or there is an accident, you open youself up to a lot of problems with no benefit.

  • power usage - Smartphones are balanced so they last about a day, if you add this feature that will increase the number of signals being sent/received this will have to come at the expense of other features or making the phone bigger/uglier

  • security - if you implement message caching on phones then you open yourself up to storing child porn/attacks and your phone being vulnerable

  • Latency and reliability or range, if you cache messages to allow for delayed conversations you have no idea how long they will take to get there or if they will get there at all, if you don't then you are limited to the phones connected to the mesh at the same time as you.

  • Critical mass - unless every phone has this then no phone will want to have this as it's useless

[–]avsa [S] 5 points 1 month ago

I don't care about internet video streaming: but since everyone has a tiny battery and radio in their pockets, we should at least be always able to send short text messages/emails to each other, without any centralized server. Isn't that what the internet was made for?

PS. I am a iPhone lover, but I know that apple would never implement this, and this is one thing would make me consider Android..

[–]theDrWho 4 points 1 month ago

those devices would still need to get on the internet, or at least one of them

not sure if you thought this out

[–]avsa [S] 4 points 1 month ago

That's not how mesh networking works.

A wants to talk to B. A and B are within range of each other, they should be able to communicate. If A wants to talk to C, and C is within range of B but not A, then B can become a server and relay encrypted communication between A and C. If C has internet access and D is not within range of anyone but is also connected to the internet, then C can relay messages from D to A and B.

[–]Smallpaul 7 points 1 month ago

Okay, so A connects to B and B connects to C and C connects to D. And all of A through D are in Alexandria.

But your goal is to get a message to a CNN reporter in New York City.

What are the chances that the message will make it all of the way?

Think of the routing and bandwidth management issues.

[–]astroid0 6 points 1 month ago

He is trying to say if there is a 'kill switch' then this ad hoc network would have no internet access. One of the nodes needs access.

[–]avsa [S] 1 point 1 month ago

Yes but if only one node has access, he can easily share it to others. For example one satellite dish or setting up wifi on a border, imagine a small group of hacktivists.

And even if no one has outside access, sometimes just having a big intranet is good enough. In the case of middle east, they wouldn't be able maybe to get their message out, but would still be able to organize the rallies.

[–]junkit33 9 points 1 month ago

Yes but on a larger scale, the node with access would eventually get overloaded. On an intranet alone, you'd have a lot of poisoning issues to deal with, not to mention the difficulty in connecting one side of the country to the other side.

There actually is a lot of interest in mesh networking, and research being done, it's just not quite there yet. Your interest is noble, but the best thing you can do right now is further the research and not worry about why we aren't using half-cooked concepts in practical matters.

[–]crashblossom 1 point 1 month ago

I'm just a student - learning programming and reading about mesh networking and internet protocol - could you briefly explain 'poisoning' or point me somewhere to read up on it? thanks

[–]theDrWho 2 points 1 month ago

"If C has internet access"

That would not solve the internet kill switch fear.

[–]avsa [S] 0 points 1 month ago

It's hard to cut access to every node, because sometimes all you need is a very dedicated group of hackers. Mesh networking would multiply their effect (of course not infinitely)

[–]baryluk 2 points 1 month ago

Well, how about for example using B.A.T.M.A.N ? It should just work on android with simple hacking.

But I guess it will drain your (and others) battery pretty quickly.

[–][deleted] 2 points 1 month ago

1) Mobile ad-hoc networks have a whole slew of problems your standard network doesn't have, making it impractical. These kinds of networks are still a hot research topic

2) Power consumption would be far too high

3) It really wouldn't solve the problem overall - the internet isn't the internet without the huge network backing. If the backbone went down, we'd still lose all the things we recognize as "the internet".

[–]razzmataz 2 points 1 month ago

As cool as mesh networking is, it's slow and a pain in the ass. You'd be relagated back to using things like uucp and batching remote commands, mail and file transfers...

[–]zokier 2 points 1 month ago

I think it would be easier to begin creating mesh networks with wlan-routers. Something like Fon networks, but instead of offering internet directly, create own mesh which might have some exit points to internet.

[–]detaer 1 point 1 month ago

Meshnetworking can be easily shutdown with proper jamming equipment. Seeing it work at defcon was impressive. The military has devices that can be used to shutdown wifi in key areas if needed. Read as shut down public communication during periods they define as unrest.

[–]rkenned 0 points 1 month ago

Except they've never been used for that purpose, and they've only been used to prevent wireless devices from being used to detonate IED's. I guess you could still read it that way though.

[–]syn_ack 1 point 1 month ago*

You should have a look at the Serval Project. From the site:

The second is a permanent system for remote areas that requires no infrastructure and creates a mesh-based phone network between Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones, and eventually specially designed mobile phones that can operate on other unlicensed frequencies, called Batphone.

There's also the Village Telco Google Group that has instructions for setting it up, but it look like it's not for the faint of heart!

Edit: added links

[–]ex_ample 1 point 1 month ago

mmmm.... laziness?

[–]tamrix 1 point 1 month ago

Oh I'm sorry my lord. I'll get right onto it.

[–]bobowzki 1 point 1 month ago

Imagine how slow it would be :-) but cool...

[–]globetrotters 1 point 1 month ago

Check out Zendegi by Greg Egan.

http://www.amazon.com/Zendegi-Greg-Egan/dp/1597801747/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298542946&sr=8-1

There's a scene in the book where Iranian protesters use mesh networking to communicate after the government shuts down all other communications.

[–]merstham 1 point 1 month ago

go [old skool] (http://www.ampr.org/amprnet.html)

[–]beardedlinuxgeek 1 point 1 month ago

/r/darknetplan

[–]hobbified 1 point 1 month ago

Because there's no plan to make it actually work.

[–]avsa [S] 0 points 1 month ago

But there are many protocols that work. And android is in theory, open source. Isn't there anybody that cares?

[–]tef 7 points 1 month ago

man, if only enough people cared about things all the worlds problems would be solved

obviously noone really cares if p=np

[–][deleted] 4 points 1 month ago

I challenge you to find me a protocol that "works".

Most "work" only up to the point that you can get some short-term small-scale communication going before the network destabilizes and nothing works.

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