On Tuesday 21 Jun 2011 21:07:42 Sheref Younan wrote: > Hi, > I'm wondering about the feasibility to use Freenet over a mesh network > independent of the internet. Where every Freenet node will be a node in the > mesh, nodes will communicate with neighbours via WiFi or other wireless > communication medium without the need of conventional Internet as a > communication medium. > > This will have the advantage of offering a scalable and decentralized > network that will not need an existing Internet infrastructure and will > (among other things) resist block outs like the infamous one made in Egypt > during its revolution (January 2011) > > any ideas, comments ? > > Thanks, > Sheref Younan > It's not a bad idea in principle. But there are many problems: 1. Freenet needs long links as well as short links. Any other scalable routing protocol probably has the same issue, but Freenet in particular needs a lot of short links and a few long links for routing to work. 2. Whatever you build, you'll need some way to exchange data between different towns or cities. One obvious possibility is to move data on a USB stick or a hard disk. This won't be part of end-to-end routing for freenet (at least not until we have long term requests, in the distant future), but if you are using freenet you could use binary blobs to move chosen content between disconnected darknets in each city. 3. Generally wifi doesn't work all that well in pure ad hoc mode. Scaling is a problem above a few thousand nodes. Especially if everyone wants to use the cheapest possible antennas at ground level (in theory directional links at rooftop level could scale a bit better). New technology (e.g. better MIMO) may help. 4. Freenet cannot take advantage of various properties of radio that other protocols might be able to. 5. Freenet tends to assume high uptime (nodes are switched on a large proportion of the time), and in darknet mode (the safest) only talks to your friends. If they are a long way away you'll need to route the packets there, and it won't be very efficient, as they'll have to be repeated many times before they even reach the next freenet-hop. And then multiply this by several hops on freenet... 6. In principle the frequencies can be jammed and/or the nodes can be found.
I'm not saying mesh networks and freenet don't combine for underground communications... in principle it seems like a good idea ... Another key point: It may make sense to have automatic rendezvous when people's phones are within range of each other, rather than fixed nodes. An "opennet" version of this is called Haggle, have a look at it. Being opennet, they will talk to any node within range, so there is some worry over the fact that your phone will be broadcasting your desire for the latest illegal blog post... IMHO any underground network like that would probably have some parts be wifi, some of it very directional and hidden, some of it illegal satellite internet hookups, and some parts sneakernet (either swapping disks for long range transport, or possibly between friends for reasonable bandwidth but very high latency, or some sort of phone-rendezvous thing). Probably it would have very high latency in parts, and Freenet can't do that just yet, but some people (me) think it should eventually, or something like Freenet might. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20110706/ef8097a3/attachment.pgp>
