Contact using LinkedIN.com

A few of you have linked with me using linkedIN.com Just want to say your welcome! Don

One response

Nope I need more responses. Find your favorite wireless mesh blog entry add your comment. Either you like it, or you have a different view, or you want me to stop or what ever you want to comment on, I will accept. The only statistic I have is how many hits I get on these websites. I don't ask for names, or location but it would help me know how you feel.

Hopefully I asking, no begging you please interact. I need add least 50 responses to this blog. Can you help?

Thanks

Don

How to on Open 802.11S

For everyone that is interested check out Open802.11s org how to pages. Just for review this version is available on newest linux kernel.

New Generation of Wireless Mesh

In September is it will be five years working on Locustworld's wireless mesh using AODV.

On the wireless front, the new kernel includes support for 802.11s, the draft standard for wireless mesh networking. With mesh networking each node on the network acts a relay for each other, promising higher redundancy and better throughput.

This new generation of wireless mesh will be available for all distro of Linux. Does this mean another five years of experimentation?

OK so I said to myself over 200 blog entries on wireless mesh is enough, eh?

Over two hundred blog entries on Wireless Mesh. Ok maybe I aint the best writer in the world and I only have under 10,000 of you guys and gals reading this per month with no response. None what so ever. I promised myself that I would slow down and let everyone have a chance to read but some of my work is already dated. So I am going back to add a paragraph here and word there and maybe even think of publishing some of this wireless mesh articles.

I've just updated my most popular article Wireless Mesh Topology. I can say that after 4 years there is over 100,000 unique ip address that have hit this page. It is linked to many websites and once was put into wikipedia as an external link (now gone.) It is for that reason that I started to update a few of the articles.

Sincerely,

Don Moskaluk

Array-AP

Finally after 5 years of prototyping and testing I've put a winning combination together! This industrial open hardware device can run as an access point or wireless mesh cluster.

Moskaluk Array-AP comes with VIA Eden-V4 processors with speeds of 1GHz using a 400MHz front size bus and a DDR2 SO-DIMM socket accommodating up to 1GB memory & 4 GB or more of HD, offering 18-20% increased network performance levels when compared with VIA Eden-based appliances. The unit does not require any active cooling, offering much higher reliability and longer life span compared with existing network platforms.

The four Ethernet connections can connect to the Internet using an Ethernet connection and can be linked to other application sources linked servers or other radio devices. At one point I was thinking to remove the radio card out of the device and only have a firmware control the other radio devices; however, I saw that a basic Wi-Fi device was needed. I’m not sure if I will be offering various radio cards but the device uses mini-PCI cards and is flexible to modify.

Evolving to the Next Level

When I build a prototype I normally don’t “wow” myself until I build the Array-AP. Not only did I meet my expectations I exceeded them to possibly creating the next generation of Internet using a wireless mesh. When you look at the new Array-AP it doesn’t appear to be different other than any other MeshAP other than the 1u rack mount option. In fact the pundits would say it is just an embedded system with a 802.11b radio card and 4 Ethernet ports and at the price of $600 - $800 US it better do something else then simply route using wireless mesh. They would also say that because this is an industrial solution that this in itself would exceed any commercial-off-the-shelf wireless AP. But when you design hardware to meet Municipal standards you shouldn’t be building components using PC type equipment. The fact that most Muni AP routers will be continuously on needs specialized industrial embedded hardware. But Array-AP’s unique combination of Wireless Mesh, Virtualization, Supercomputer, and by also providing Software as a Service (SaaS) it starts to turn heads. The combination is called MVSS.

The physical hardware on Array-AP will meet or exceed many expectations regarding a wireless mesh. The single 802.11b (Prism chipset) radio card will not turn a single head when 802.11N is the new standard. Having a single radio card in the unit will not make this compete with the likes of units that can handle up to 8 different radio cards. The idea for a single radio card is to use that radio card to access the service solution. Traditional AODV routing will be done with a combination of aggregation or clustering using MeshAP, wireless Bridge, Free Space Optics, Fibre Optics, or other types of Metropolitan backbone technology either in licensed or unlicensed operation. That means your wired or wireless mesh can exceed 1 Gbps.

The Array-AP limitations are 100BT Ethernet ports and a single 802.11B radio card. What on earth was I thinking when I built this unit? Well the solution was to build a wired router using Locustworld v1311. So I did I built a 2 Ethernet port MeshAP with an 802.11B radio card. I basically replaced my current off the shelf wireless router with this unit and I found tremendous benefit when integrating wireless mesh right down to the injection level. Quality of Service (QoS) improves the Telephony operation as well as the IPTV operations. QoS is now at the edge of the service application support for wireless mesh. This becomes the ultimate for triple or quadruple play network environments.

The Array-AP starts to stand out not only from a physical construction but also from configuration. Most wireless MeshAP’s is built with less than 500 MHz and 64 Megs of RAM and disk space. Because of their small footprint they can easily be embedded into different hardware such as PC Engine or Via Mini-ITX boards. The Array-AP runs at 1 GHz and has over 4 Gig of disk space and 1 Gig of ram. This is truly unique solid-state construction.

The idea came to me based on the CERN supercomputer and utilizing VMware to provide other application services within a Wireless Mesh router. The problem is that many people require faster “Last Mile” networking, meaning that people want faster Internet connections. What CERN did was to combine High Performance Clustering (HPC) with a dedicated network. The access to this super computer did not require more than a dial connection because the supercomputer was being accessed with X windows. Ok, so if you have 100 to 1000 of the Array-APs you can start utilizing the access computing to build the same network mesh network giving your client the ability to utilize the entire mesh array as one big computer hence the name Array-AP. I figure if you are building out ISP you might as well build out the next generation of Internet.

I believe that this should be a plug and play type scenario. Once you have decided on your operation that deploying it should be as easy as plugging it in and watching your MVSS grow.

The neat idea about integrating a supercomputer into a wireless mesh access point is that as the technology comes and goes it can be utilized from the basic dialup internet connection to the latest technology offering. To see more of the Array-AP please see Going to the Next Level.

Bubble Deployment

Fixing the Muni Wireless Mesh is not going to be any small order. As early adopters many Muni Wireless Mesh have fallen short to providing complete coverage and operations. These deployments range for bad design to problem equipment and everything in between. Most situations can fix by either adding more or rearranging the deployment. Developing new best practices can help for wireless mesh deployment can help municipalities to fix and finish there deployments. One of the unique solutions to fix a Muni Wireless Mesh is to deploy the mesh bubble in small section in and around an area. Bubble deployment is more of a prototype phase. Deploying the wireless mesh in a community and figuring out the problems prior to deploying it as an end state solution would be with in best practices of any Project Management methodology. This best practice was some how forgotten in the wireless mesh deployment. Wireless Mesh has a bloody nose but the bleeding will eventually be stopped.

Innovative solutions for network optimization and internet acceleration

Ok so I read an article that was new and innovative. I then went out and research it and found more information. I then thought wow this is the next generation of the internet. The first thing is how to put a business model together then I remember a commercial on TV regarding snow boarders. The gist of the commercial was "we weren’t just making a snow board we were inventing a new sport." Similar to this the person was not inventing anything new but putting together a new solution that created an awesome new way to deliver the new internet.

Now just to recap back in the early Ninety’s most people got access to the internet via a dial up 56Kbps connection, and for business and governments there were offering from Frame Relay, T1, and other commercial offering. The brought the speed to roughly 1.5 MBPS and the backbone was roughly 100 MBPS.

Now the internet has involved in terms of service offering bring larger bandwidths in Toronto Dial UP still prevails however it has been overtaken by DSL and Cable connections. Business our still relied on Frame Relay, T1, OC3, Dark Fibre any where from 1.5 all the way up to 40 GBPS or higher.

Now with today’s current technology CERN has come up with a network and servers speed that can be measured in Petaflop. A Petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Floating-point is considered to be a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers. Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily.

So I hope that you are still with me regarding Petaflop. Petaflop is a huge number and we are still dealing with dialup connections with Internet. Today we are always looking for greater bandwidth to download or to capture information in order that our computers can process it. The architecture is either 2 tiers or 3 tiers. We always need more bandwidth grow because we our CPU are growing in our computers. As computer power increase so does the delivery system to the internet. But that is the way it is.

Now back to the guys from CERN. Well they built a supercomputer and use fibre network to connect the entire cluster computer estimated to be at 250,000 computer world wide to produce these speeds. The combination of all these computers and the dedicated fibre optic networks produces these types of speeds and the system itself. There isn’t a name for combining the internet and cluster computers to provide this type of unique service! So her goes I’ll name it Clustered Computer with Integrated Network or CCIN.

I read in one of the articles that all that is required to access this system is a simple 56K dialup line. Since the client doesn’t need CPU at it machine to process all you need is a monitor and input devices like speakers, keyboard and mouse and you have access Petaflop worth of computing power? But before you start jumping up and down the concept of the internet acts more like a mainframe than a PC. Your data is shared. So in laymen’s terms those MP3 wouldn’t be coming down the pipe anytime soon. You could only access them through your device. Basically the information is shared. What it sound like is that you would use X window technology to gain access to it. So will the next big thing be a whole bunch of X window appliances?

No, it gets better than this. So I figure hey with 802.11B you could have a lot of X windows devices running off a clustered of Linux boxes. So instead of everyone trying to download the latest jazz album maybe giving them access to a supercomputer would be better. So it doesn’t mater where you are all you need to get is an X window environment. That means you would give them Software as a Service. That means you could give them unlimited types of software to run and access. But the greatest part is the 802.11B Wi-Fi connection is all you ever going to need. (I laugh at myself at that last statement because it sure sound like Bill Gates saying that all you every going to need is 640 k.) No I think that was too much 56 kbps for should be enough for the next ten years.

But wait this gets much better. So before you go out and start building a supercomputer and offering services I figure I go and research if any companies are doing this. Sure enough my idea is not unique and that some companies are trying to do the same thing. Have a quick read on this service http://www.arteraturbo.com/main.asp?Nav_Bar=15 should we be building supercomputer for the wireless mesh? Yeah I think so!

So can you read the headline Wireless Mesh Speed break world record and exceed Petaflop speeds. Yeah having access to a supercomputer be neat what be better if you were mobile and had access to a supercomputer. Now I can see everyone going out and Googling HPC cluster open and viola they find the Rock.

I can hear my buddy from Vancouver say “Long Live Beowulf” (sort of inside joke that a movie was called Bewoulf and the first single system image has the same name.)

It just another form of Control

Traffic shaping also known as "packet shaping" is an attempt to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, lower latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet a certain criteria. Using Locustworld, traffic shaping is any action on a set of packets which imposes additional delay on those packets such that they conform to some predetermined constraint a contract or traffic profile.

Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period using bandwidth throttling, or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent which rate is limiting. This control can be accomplished in many ways and for many reasons; however traffic shaping is always achieved by delaying packets. Traffic shaping is commonly applied at the network edges to control traffic entering the network, but can also be applied by the traffic source for example, computer or network card or by an element in the network.

Traffic policing is the distinct but related practice of packet dropping and packet marking. An example of why you want to utilize traffic shaping is providing Quality of Service (QoS.) My recent focus and interest has been improving and providing carrier class wireless network. This is partly motivated by a requirement for an Internet Protocol Quality of Service (IP QoS) solution to allow us to converge our video, voice and data networks with in the Mesh Network.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has been asked to investigate the impact of "traffic shaping" by Internet service providers (ISPs) on Canadian Internet users. http://www.mediacastermagazine.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=82157&issue=03312008

Simply put one must utilize a form of control if the goal is to provide QoS for streaming media then it is required on a share network; however, when traffic shaping is utilize to restrict the usage for non QoS application and it is utilized for non QoS but for bandwidth control then these practices and the implications for consumers should be advised appropriately. Since this practice has been utilized for years it important not to debate on traffic shaping but to debate how the consumer or client is affected by such controls. It’s funny how when you subscribe to a service for years, how the service evolves to the point that general consumers are impacted.