Blogger may be going down

I got an email from the blogging company indicating that they are stop ftp blogs. Hmmm I run my blog off my own URL. It keeps everything together and now they "google" are telling me this is coming to an end.

Well, then, I guess the blog will come to an end. Really though the idea of having the blog on some cloud computer with a different URL is concerning. I just hope that they have an alternate? Maybe I will install wordpress or something.

For now, if the blog disappears then you know who is in control.

Remember Stability of the Mesh

Yeah, talk about getting egg on my face; I put the third mesh node and low and behold a third hardware problem. Is it my equipment now becoming old and tarnished more like rusted? Here I go back to the drawing board and will try to figure out why I lost 3 units in one location? Stability of the mesh starts with electricity, then hardware; then software or the balance of all three.

To FreeBSD Mesh or not that is the question

For all the people who read my blog check out the following:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/WifiMesh

Virtualized Locustworld

So the pundits said it couldn’t be done. I went to Locustworld website and had to go to their mirror site to download the iso disk. I used Build 25 dev 81 and was able to run it in VMware player. I had to use Linux 2.2.x to configure it and monkey around with network card setting and yes it ran. It didn’t run well but it ran. It was functional put could upload any files. I wanted to register it with WIANA but the network connection was stuck on 10.x.x.x I believe that was the VMware network. So in a pinch Locustworld could be setup to run in virtual world it would take some tweaking but it could run.

I have written on the benefits of virtualization of Locustworld. I would like to work with anyone who could take the basic setup and tweak it to the next level; however, the alternative would be to setup FreeBSD to the same thing. FreeBSD 8.0 has a built in mesh component but when you look at all the services that Locustworld has you wonder if you have the time and energy to build a similar product. Naw, but the mesh 8.0 is based on 802.11s and that great news. I know I won’t have the time to build this but if anyone is planning to fork FreeBSD in to an embedded mesh node, and then please give me a call. I would be happy to try it out and use it.

Testing Fractals

So from the Icicles in my enclosurer back to Fractals, I replace the NEMA 4 enclosurer with a WRAP board which is one of my older units that got hit by lightning. Other than the power supply it still works, but for how long? When I put the node up I created a perfect mesh. All nodes could mesh with each other. The differences were that some had various dbi’s between each node but some how it worked. It was really neat to see everything meshing and working together. The last time I saw this was in my lab. So to see it actually work was great. When I look at it now with using Fractals it may sense and tried to keep it working this way. I knew that this perfect mesh connection would not hold up because one of the distances from uplink node to the new node had a building, trees and was not put at the optimum height for clean Fresno effect. So I knew I would have to optimize the mesh nodes to work with each other. I left it a lone for less than 24 hours and it did start to optimize it self and again the problem occur that the link was flakey (see Stability of the Mesh.) When shape the connection of the nodes similar method I used for optimizing the mesh it became instantly rock solid. Now this is the same setup but different hardware. I not sure if the Fractals or not but it seems to fit Fractal equation. Yet again, using Fractal method gave me insight to deployment. Who knew, the wireless mesh could benefit from Fractals.

Icicles in my NEMA 4 enclosurer

Oh boy, talk about loosing 2 units. I have a number of NEMA enclosurer which I used to house wireless mesh node electronics. I used NEMA as it will prevent rain, ice, snow etc, from getting to the electronics. But forming icicles within the enclosurer is a first. So this is what had happened. I try to over clock the radio, may be that is not the right term, I tried to put get more power from the radio cards by setting up the software to more than the dbi maximum. Normally most cards can’t handle this and instantly burn up or stop functioning. The card I had was pcmcia from Demartech and when I ask I to put out more power, well it does. Bonus, right? Nope it runs much hotter. Now the hardware configuration in the mesh node contains a standard ati power supply (you know the type found in a pc). Well it had a fan and I thought well everything is sealed up tight no worries right? Nope, what had happen was the unit became very hot and it did not dispense the heat from the radio card as well as the CPU. The temperature became below 0 c and condensation form with in the NEMA 4 enclosurer. It then started to drip onto the motherboard and the unit stop working. When I tried to recycle (reboot) the computer I started to get the beeps from the start up of the motherboard that indicated moisture. Oops. So when I went and open the container what I found was awesome. An icicle formed from the condensation (test the NEMA in the water to see if there were any leaks, no leaks were detected.) Wow, this was a first. I thought that the enclosurer was big enough to dissipate the heat generated. I was wrong again. It took me six years to learn this one. I now find the old Wrap boards and Demartech metal enclosurer to be the best. I also observed a lot of oxidation on the radio cards. My fear is that the radio cards are becoming like a rust bucket. I may need to treat some of the components in the future for oxidation.

What is in a SSID

So I thought I would start the title What is in a Name but that was already done. The following is a link to funny SSID's that obviously has sexual overtones. But the Marketing side of my brain started to think and sometimes naming your wi-fi or this cause your Mesh SSID is as important. Here the link .

An SSID is also referred to as a network name because it is a name that identifies a wireless network or in our case wireless mesh. The SSID differentiates on WLAN from another, so all access points and devices attempting to connect to a specific wi-fi must use the same SSID. I use a small 3 letter abbreviation but never consider to put in a 32 character unique identifier. May be I should have spelt out my name as "superior network dont leave home with out it." Yeah that be too long, eh?

Not another Next Big Thing.

I’m constantly being asked what the next big thing for wireless mesh is. Well standardization is the main focus and most of new Linux distribution will have the latest component built into the OS. I like the UNIX and FreeBSD and the next release of FreeBSD® Version 8.0 focuses include wireless networking, virtualization, and storage technology. I am currently using FreeNAS for network area storage (excellent.)

802.11 wireless networking has been overhauled to add Virtual Access Points (VAP) support, which allows multiple wireless networks to be hosted from a single access point. Draft 802.11 mesh networking support allows FreeBSD-based devices to dynamically link together to create a larger wireless network. Other notable updates in FreeBSD Version 8.0 include: FreeBSD 8.0's wireless network stack is the industry leader, and makes FreeBSD the platform of choice for a future generation of networking products.

FreeBSD 8.0's network stack also offers multiprocessing optimizations: a revised link layer subsystem, per-CPU flow cache, multi-queue transmit support, and significant UDP and TCP protocol scalability improvements. Zero-copy buffer extensions to BPF improve high volume packet capture performance.

In FreeBSD 8.0, virtual machine administrators in FreeBSD's ground-breaking lightweight "Jails" can now create their own nested jails. FreeBSD now supports host and guest modes in VirtualBox, and can run as a 32-bit Xen DomU guest.

The Network File System (NFS) implementation has been enhanced with GSSAPI encryption, and also experimental NFSv4 client and server support. In addition to ZFS moving from experimental to production status, FreeBSD 8.0 introduces GPT boot support.
Yeah, so if you looking for a good OS to start to build your Wireless Mesh you may want to look at FreeBSD 8.0.

Did I just stumble upon stability of mesh

Most of the time I write how wonderful wireless mesh is; however, today is more of how I reached network stability by not allowing wireless mesh to automatic determine the best path to use. Since the area I have choose in a highly populated area with a gauntlet of buildings, the amount of signal reflection and the interference can lead to havoc. Specifically having wireless mesh link to two other devices and having them mesh together is founding principal regarding this technology. So here I come, I've break all the rules, I do everything that is opposite and setup a 4 hop dog leg preventing wireless mesh to have only a single path to the Internet. What happen was simply magical. Network stability. The nodes seems very stable and performance has improved tremendously. Throughput of the signal is laser fast, such that maintain a constant speed.

OK, so how did this happen? I have a 3 hop dog leg. At the end of the dog leg one of my node tries to connect with the up link node. What happens is the last node can't find the path to the Internet. It keeps searching. So to stop the searching I removed the redundancy of the network path. I took the strongest signal that is consistent over time between the nodes. This worked.

Next I added another node to the system; this node had the ability to reduce the hopes by providing and alternative path to the gateway. What happened was an nodes became confused to which was the best path. In a moment of time the new node had the strongest signal then it would loose it and another node would then have a better signal to the gateway.

Enough I said. So I stop the flaky connections and identify the strongest signals, over time, between nodes. I then set the "blocknode" command in WIANA to ensure that the nodes would not connect to each other. What this produced was a single path to the gateway.

How I determine the strongest signal was I check "reporter" on each node and determine which had the strongest connection such that
Node B: had two connection node C and node D (this node a weaker signal)
Node C: had a strong connection to B and D
Node D: had equally strong signal to both B and C

I figure B to D was flaky and block them from communicating like wise Node C always was trying to connect to the Up link node called node A. So I block C from connecting to Node A, thus Node A connected only to node B
B connected with C
and C connect only with D i.e.
A to B to C to D

A to D is stable.

I now call this a structured Mesh. Not allowing the software to determine which is the best path is a break through. The idea came from watching a show on fractals. The largest segment is from A to B. Next B to C and finally C to D. B to D would seem faster avoiding C but the length of connection between the two was actually slower, Such that the further you go between connection the slower the connection. OK, I got lucky.

The fractal of B, if it had a redudant path to the up link nodes, such that it had a choice between up links then the would had to be the same for nodes C and D. They two should have an alternate route. It just make sense. Why have a redudant route in C and D where either A or B was not redudant? Thus C and D was looking for a redudant path.

There is no different in the risk node failure because of this. If main branch is not redudant then why should the outer branches be redudant?

Network stability not by using wireless mesh but by using fractal.

Oh performance is excellent.

I very impressed that 4 hops out can play video with no jitter.

Final thought is I have one arm radiating out now to add a second arm.

Wireless Mesh for Earth to Space

So I had laughed so hard that I started to snort, this is how my wife describe my description of space elevator challenge. I saw some earlier results and was laughing at the results. But it got me thinking and I stopped laughing and started to do some research and read other people research.

First check out the Nova video on this solution. You can see the competition for building a space elevator prototype is getting narrow and competitor are being lead by a bunch of kids out of the University of Saskatchewan. The whole concept is a ribbon made out of carbon tubes are sent from a satellite orbiting, and a free electron laser is pointed at this solar collector that provides the power to run an electric motor up this ribbon of carbon tube toward the satellite, hence Arthur C. Scott’s vision of space elevator. The fun part is that the people that are competiting are gaining great knowledge in developing this technology and are becoming the experts. This is a great idea.

But what got me excited and thinking was the laser power, solar collectors system that they would use to propel the craft. It used a laser beam that focuses its energy onto the solar panels. The panels would convert the light to electricity and system would not need any batteries. If you have seen my solar panel experiments running a wireless mesh node you can see where I’m going with this. Well basically a wireless mesh node that is power by laser. But my thinking took me a step further the laser would also be used to provide communication. The laser would be equipped with Free Space Optics (FSO.) So it would not only provide the energy through a narrow beam of light it also would provide gigabits of bandwidth communication, such that point to point. It is similar to Ethernet over Power line, where Ethernet signal is used in conjunction with the power line to provide both power and communication but without any infrastructure between the two devices.

But we have seen with laser in the past that when they are used for communication such as Free Space Optics that they are susceptible due to weather conditions. For terrestrial applications, the principal limiting factors are:

• Beam dispersion
• Atmospheric absorption
• Rain
• Fog (10..~100 dB/km attenuation)
• Snow
• Background light
• Pointing stability in wind
• Pollution / smog

If the sun goes exactly behind the transmitter, it can swamp the signal.
These factors cause an attenuated receiver signal and lead to higher bit error ratio (BER). To overcome these issues, vendors found some solutions, like multi-beam or multi-path architectures, which use more than one sender and more than one receiver. Some state-of-the-art devices also have larger fade margin (extra power, reserved for rain, smog, fog). To keep an eye-safe environment, good FSO systems have a limited laser power density and support laser classes 1 or 1M. Atmospheric and fog attenuation, which are exponential in nature, limit practical range of FSO devices to several kilometres; but and this is a big but, the space elevator to get around this problem will utilize a free electron laser. Now doing some research on this the laser would be targeting a single object that is moving in a straight line. Tracking this objects and keeping the solar panel align with the beam has already been invented.

Wow you can theoretically use this laser through any of the terrestrial conditions fore mentioned. This has already been examined NASA-DOE reference design of the ‘70s Koomanoff and Bloomquist, 1998. I think it was referred to PV-driven cloud-penetrating microwave beamers. Now this is what I talking about, laser that can penetrate terrestrial conditions. FSO commercial applications are focused on providing the most inexpensive product that they can. They should have been focus on producing the best quality product and to me quality is PV-driven cloud-penetrating microwave beamers (CPMB.) Imagine using these technologies together call it Ethernet over Laser (EoL.)

We implement wireless mesh using 802.11b in the past it follows a typical wireless distribution; however, having the ability to interconnect nodes that are in range. The uplink nodes or nodes that connected to internet or internet backbone provide initial protocols so that mesh nodes can communicate with each other and thus providing framework to create a mesh cloud. Now substituting the uplink Ethernet with FSO utilizing CPMB may provide the infrastructure not only provides backbone but the energy to run the mesh node. It could also be the communication device that the space elevator may use. Or it can give the wireless mesh the ability to go to a low orbit satellite power by upward facing CPMB.

Distributing the CPMB to other nodes would be difficult because today’s solar panels are not that efficient. This would be similar to an electric car driving down the high way having an electric turbine generating its electricity. Eventually the car will stop. I’m thinking that each step of the CPMB would have a power loss say “efficiency of the initial solar panel – the power that it would run the mesh node – Transmitter laser going to the next node or back to the original node.” Yeah, a lot of loss but depending on the solar collectors it may have enough power to distribute to two other mesh nodes. If efficiency of the solar collectors can be increase and the redistribution of the excess laser beam can be tapped and redirected to other nodes. A viable solution can be made for communication.

If this solution can be made for communication it can be made for other solutions. The University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, It’s about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds— some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. Can you imagine if this thing could run continuously it would be able to power everything?

This technology could be that turn point that we have all been looking for a laser that could power your home, your transportation and provide you with communications. But lets take these baby steps first; the future is bright. I will be watching the space elevator competition. It has the components of changing the world. Who would of thought that space elevator competition could be the catalyst in identify new technology that could provide communication and power through a beam of light.