Locusts meet the Hare

Actual it is a big grasshopper meeting a bunny rabbit. 
This article doe not contain any yoga moves
and yes there is a penguin involved.
By Don Moskaluk January 4, 2007

Over recent years there has been a flurry of new devices and solutions aimed at the wireless network space using Wi-Fi, Telephony and VoIP.  Perhaps the most prevalent has been Locustworld, and Asterisk.  In Locustworld distro, a combination of wireless networking and Asterisk VoIP solutions, it has brought two outstanding open source projects together with turnkey solutions.  Like many solutions, the design decisions appear to have been made based on wireless and similarities to wired Internet. Locustworld by their acclaim states, “The Locustworld Mesh is the most widely used and successful mesh networking system in the world.” As part of its VoIP applications Locustworld uses Asterisk.  “Asterisk is the most popular and extensible open source telephone system in the world.”  One would thing that combining these two open source project should be explosive.  Well, I’m not sure but I haven’t heard too many Asterisk people jump on the bandwagon with Locustworld or vise versa.   Sure there have been many installation of VoIP using Locustworld but I haven’t heard of a community solely using a Locustworld integration of Asterisk.  

There are many reasons why people have not adopted Locustworld Asterisk.  First and foremost there is little documentation.  The Asterisk applications’ intended use was for development and not production.  Running asterisk on Locustworld is not intended as a stand-alone production system. There is a role for a MeshAP to do some VoIP function to pre-process the VoIP and distribute the load, allowing for codec conversion, protocol conversion, routing and trunking through a mesh network, but this is a second generation application, once you have your VoIP up and running and your system is growing, this allows you to get more mileage out of the available bandwidth.

Don't expect to run a stand-alone asterisk installation in tandem with the mesh on a MeshAP.  If Locustworld Asterisk would be as simple to implement and configure as their Mesh Network then maybe many more would adopt Locustworld Asterisk. 

The trend with applications is to have easy to install applications that require little if any configuration.  Locustworld understands the ease of use concept because if they didn’t they would not have achieved its level of success in wireless mesh networking.  With Asterisk open source project it too has developed simple and elegant solutions to provide easy configuration.  One particular Asterisk solution is called Trixbox.  “Trixbox is a business class IP PBX system based on Digum's Asterisk Open Source PBX Software.”   The Trixbox solution incorporates the ease of use concept by combining a package that makes it fast and simple to install and configure.

The latest version of Trixbox provides an amazing amount of applications that have been combined together to provide fully rich Telephony solutions, which has the same ease of installation as Locustworld.  Before anyone gets the idea to marry the two projects together there needs to be a very long courtship.  Understanding how each one works and how they can be combined together is very easy; however, ensuring the lifecycle of each project and development environment can be very complex.  The complexity starts with having two different versions of Linux, Slackware for Locustworld and CentOS for Trixbox.  Both systems require very little operating system experience.  If you have the basic UNIX or LINUX you can easily manage.  But, and here is the big but, Trixbox does require System Administration, database administration and application administration.    Due to Trixbox ongoing development cycle it requires security administration as well.  Locustworld, by it nature, has this already built in and when required it can be easily updated.  

It is not the different operating system that either is a concern nor is it the different life cycles that each project has achieved, it is the use of the Trixbox application within the wireless services of Locustworld.  To provide a telephone service with in Locustworld mesh network will require a new framework or methodology.  This methodology should be based not only on ease of use but on quality of service QoS.  Ensuring that all the applications within the Trixbox can be utilized within the wireless mesh network their needs to be a method that will provide continuous QoS improvement within the wireless mesh infrastructure.     

Existing wireless mesh installation might not have taken the necessary steps in providing a carrier class installation that VoIP installation requires. It has been identified by many other wireless mesh equipment and service providers that more than four hops of wireless mesh may cause problems for VoIP.  In any case, the necessary combining of VoIP with wireless mesh will require more than hardware or software to be successfully deployed.  It will require flexibility of hardware and software to work together.  Locustworld wireless mesh is very rich in its flexibility but very inflexible when it requires services to be added to its operating system; on the other hand Trixbox project provides the flexibility to add applications to its service offering.  Having these two projects work together with a methodology and documentation may provide the necessary framework for a telephony solution using a wireless mesh network.  

For people who have been building their own  infrastructure the next thing you should explore is setting up your own VoIP applications with in the wireless mesh. Maybe you have in mind replacing an existing Office PBX, or having several extensions at home and handling calls more slickly or starting up your own Internet Telephone Company. Either way there is one piece of software which coupled with the right hardware provides a comprehensive PBX solution, and that is Asterisk. 

For people who have built their own telephone system using Asterisk you can create or extend an application like VoIP through Wi-Fi.  Specifically using Wireless Mesh Locustworld and Trixbox (Asterisk)  can create some exciting new opportunities.  The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) articles and references are located on Research Papers. Here are a some more articles using Locustworld using Trixbox:

VoIP using Wireless Mesh Infrastructure

Wireless Network Setup for Trixbox