An iStumbler white paper by Alf Watt.
.public is poineering the field of mesh applications, applications which take advantage of the network's physical topology to identify services and route data direclty to local devices for improved throughput and faster access to pertinant information.
with the emergence of mesh networking a new type of network is being built. lost in the hype and hyperbolie about mesh networks is the simple fact that they do not provide the same networking environment as a local access, internet or even wireless local access network. we will examine two distinct applications which benefit from the locally connected nature of the mesh:
the internet allows us to bridge the world at reasonable speed, the local access network provides access to a campus or civic network at very high speed, emerging wireless mesh networks will provide very high speed access to nodes which are physically nearby, and proportinatly reduced rates to devices which are further and further away. mesh networks will use the internet for communicating with far away hosts, but as routing and bandwidth on the mesh improves they will begin to cover neghborhoods, cities, suburbs, marinas, and every other place people congregate to exchange with each other.
the difference is in the locality, the relation of information to the physical world around you. where the internet destroyed distance the mesh will make the world around you come alive with the thoughts and views of the people who live and work there. giving people a way to communicate directly and freely with each other is as powerfull a tool as language.
imagine if you could offer resource to the community around you, easily, securly and with a reputation managemnt system which provides assurances to both sides of the exchange. the process creates a mesh of commerce on top of the data, it turns the abstract network into a tool to gather and manage resources within a community.
along with light metadata exchange mesh networks have an advantages in the distribution of large media files, especialy those which are poppular across the network. existing peer to peer networks connect randomly across the global internet to distribute files simply because it is hard to determine which mahcines are closest and can provide the most bandwidth and resoruces.
the physical topoolgy of mesh networks makes it trivial for applications to locate the closest instace of a peer providng a desireable service and directly connect using the shortest path to that host. peer to peer file swapping will become an activity taken up between local peers instead of remote and slowly connected peers.
along with the improvements to service discovery and peer to peer file sharing the possibilty of having truly location specific information and resources opens up the door to providing community resources and communication projects which are tied to a specific location.
a library, for instance, could have a collection of digital materials avaliable on a local server. patrons in the library would have fast access to those materials and applications, such as file catalog search, which the library may provide to them.
Copyright (c) 02004, Alf Watt (alf@dotpublic.com).
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use permitted under BSD License in
license.txt.