Bi-Weekly Update 3

Project Update: Decisions made

To make progress on our project and allow us to start getting the hardware setup, some decisions had to be made. These decisions are the first of many to be made, and will be documented as we create the project.

The documented choices are the following:

• Our hardware choices are: Raspberry Pis and laptops as nodes, a router as a supernode, and other laptops and phones used as clients on the network.
• Quality of Service Metrics we have decided on measuring are: video streaming, VoIP calling, latency, bandwidth, jitter, download and upload rates, and file transfer.

We have researched a few different key components required for mesh setup. These include routing protocols with regard to mesh networking such as batman-adv and OLSR, and the OpenWrt embedded OS for use on our routing devices such as the Raspberry Pis and router.

Presuming we are able to create a mesh network and evaluate it using these metrics, then our paper will document the trials and tribulations we face in the mesh setup. If we do not succeed, then our paper will describe the pain points and possible improvements to the ecosystem to allow users with some basic networking and computer experience to set up a mesh network themselves.