Quick Mesh Project

Some weeks ago, Jason from Microduino™ kindly sent us three samples of the MicroWRT Core boards and asked us to give them a try and use them with qMp. We added the support for these devices in the recent qMp 3.2 Clearance stable release and played with them a little bit to build a small mesh with sensors.

The MicroWRT is a small and cheap development board based on the MediaTek MT7620A SoC (which integrates Ethernet networking and 2.4 GHz WiFi 2T2R), with 64 MB of RAM and 16 MB of flash storage. It is fully supported by the currently latest OpenWrt 15.05 Chaos Calmer release and, since recently, by the qMp 3.2 Clearance stable release.

The MicroWRT boards have a great performance and the SoC is well supported by qMp/OpenWrt. The devices are a great option to build a wireless mesh network that integrates sensors and actuators, thanks to their expansion board that allows integrating Microduino (Arduino-compatible) boards.

We have detailed the process of building a small mesh network with three of these devices, adding the Microduino board with a sensor and sharing the information all over the mesh network in the following two articles:

Experimenting with the Microduino MicroWRT (I)
Experimenting with the Microduino MicroWRT (II)

Leonardo Taborda from Network Bogotá (a community-driven telecommunications project based on Free Wireless Mesh Networks) lets us know about their participation in Bogotá's Software Freedom Day 2015:

The Wireless Battle of the Mesh is an event that aims to bring together people from across the globe to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, like Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX6, OLSR, and 802.11s and static routing. Of course, new protocols (working on OpenWrt) are always welcome!

This year, version 8 of this event will take place between the 3rd and the 9th of August 2015 in Maribor, Slovenia.

The qMp community endorses and supports the Battle of the Mesh v8 and teams with other communities to foster the development of bottom-up community networks.

The qMp project will support the event by:

• joining the event (and convincing others to do the same!)
• providing network hardware for the event
• helping to set up the testbed and analyze measurement results
• giving talks about advancement of our system and it's usage in communities

Many other communities endorse and support the Wireless Battle of The Mesh. For more information about the event check the Battlemesh website at http://battlemesh.org.

Join us now and free the network!

In early September 2014 we received a request from the Guanyem Barcelona movement where they asked us to give support for an event [1] on the 16th September at Cotxeres the Sants, with the idea of streaming the event live on Internet. There wasn't any network available at the venue and the 3G connection might not work if the site was crowded. Volunteers of the GuifiSants [2] community evaluated the options and decided to make it happen. A priori, it seemed a difficult and risky task, since the place was geographically complex (in the Guifi.net coverage sense), the bandwidth requirement was quite high (1 Mbps steadily) and the expected audience was about 1000 people. As you may know, the spectrum used in WiFi technology is narrow and gets saturated easily; adding the transmission power restrictions and the low through-wall signal penetration at 5 GHz the challenge was there.

To brind the GuifiSants network coverage to the venue premises we build the mobile outdoor node shown in the pictures below with the following specs (material gently provided by Routek SL [3], approx. bill of materials cost: 300 €):

• 2x TP-Link WDR-4300 (dual band 2.4/5 GHz)

• 1x Compex WP72 (single band 5Ghz)

• 1x Power Gorilla 21Ah

• Both routers had qMp installed

Using the GuifiSants qMp mesh network of the Sants district, the mobile node was placed close to the entrance of the Cotxeres de Sants building, the Compex router linked with the closest static Guifi.net node (at Plaça Ibèria) ant the TP-Link router provided the WiFi coverage inside the venue, where another TP-Link router provided connectivity to the computer actually streaming the video. The final map is shown below.

The available bandwidth was quite a surprise for us, close to 6 Mb/s (symmetric) before the event started and around 3 Mb/s while it took place with around 1,000 people in the venue.

Finally, the video streaming worked perfectly during the two hours that the event lasted, with a constant upload rate of 1 Mb/s. It was a big success both for the Guifi.net project and for the participative, citizen self-government process in Barcelona. Thanks to all the citizens that, altruistically, make the Free Network possible, more than 30,000 people could watch the live stream of the event headed by the activist Ada Colau.

Source: http://guifi.net/ca/guanyemBCN2014 (25th September 2014)

[1] https://guanyembarcelona.cat/16-de-setembre-ara-toca-guanyar/

[2] http://guifisants.net/

[3] http://routek.net