On Monday, February 08, 2016 06:54:55 PM john whelan wrote: > I'm seeing different groups have different requirements here and cost is a > major driver.
I used to be a network engineer and still do a fair amount of network architecture. That said, I fully agree with your statement regarding solidifying the requirements at the very beginning. There are many solutions available to build wireless networks. Some are more expensive than others, obviously, and expense does not equal quality or ease of use. I'm fond of the Ubiquiti network gear for building point-to-point links using their proprietary TDMA protocol (prevents blind-transmitter and stations trying to talk over one another). These devices also support traditional WiFi (802.11abg...) for point-to-multipoint connections to the clients. Since WiFi is pretty much ubiquitous on our consumer devices this is likely the easiest way to connect to computers and smartphones. Mesh networks are also nice as they provide additional availability options although not all mesh protocols are equal. The next fun is the applications. My gut reaction is to suggest all open source software and stick to what people know. You can always use postfix and dovecot for email, owncloud for sharing and managing files, and httpd for websites (and asterisk for voice communications and jabber for IM and...). To me it's very important to keep this data as local as possible. The last thing you want to do is tie up your WAN connection (wide area network: connection between cities or backhaul to the Internet) for data that is simply going between local computers. Keep your WAN connection for exchanging information between disparate local area networks (LANs). You should be able to host email, owncloud, and httpd on a small laptop or desktop computer locally to help keep the traffic on the WAN to a minimum and provide faster access to data locally. Also, you want applications on the smartphones and computers that can cache changes locally and sync them later when network connectivity is available. I know that OSMAND allows you to hold changes and notes offline until you are ready to upload them. This is a bit plus when you are out and about without network connectivity. I guess my greatest curiosity would be committing data to and retrieving data from the OSM network. Is there a way to easily host this data locally, accepting changes from clients, and then send diffs back up to the OSM servers and also receive diffs of changes from OSM. Again, with everyone needing to update their maps with the latest changes I think this would be very important. Having all the mapping data available on the LAN for whatever app they are using means only having to download the data once over the WAN saving the valuable bandwidth. It also improves speeds for the users. I just don't know how to do this piece of the puzzle. FWIW, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) folks developed a pretty neat mesh networking system that is built into their OLPC laptops. They laptops create a mesh network on their own and if one laptop has access to the master server or the Internet those resources are automatically shared with everyone else. I don't know anything about the protocol or implementation (it's on my todo list) but it's developed to just work; always nice for a emergency/tactical network. --Eric
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