| Champaign-urbana Community Wireless Network |
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The project has built a communications network using wireless networking equipment ranging from commodity personal computers to specialized Soekris miniaturized, fan-less computers with integrated networking. This is essentially the same "WiFi" equipment used in homes and offices, but CUWiN put it on rooftops to connect neighbors and form a high-speed community network. It is one of many localized Community Wireless Network projects across the world and is developing a platform which can be reused by certain types of these projects, based on their community's geographic structure. MISSION CUWiN's three-part mission is to: # connect more people to Internet and broadband services, # develop open-source hardware and software for use by wireless projects world-wide, and # build and support community-owned, not-for-profit broadband networks in cities and towns around the globe. NETWORK ARCHITECTURE The CUWiN platform intends to provide a meshed, ad-hoc, non-hierarchical network topology based on commodity infrastructure and technology. Historically, in such ad hoc networks scaling problems have arisen as the overhead involved in processing the routing information and maintaining a consistent link state among peers grows beyond the ability of the individual nodes in the network to track and forward it. In effect, once a network of this type has reached a certain size, the routing information alone uses all of the available capacity on the network. Routing protocol Research into routing protocols has uncovered algorithmic approaches to handle and manage this complexity. While starting up, CUWiN relies on Dijkstra 's Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), though they are in the process of implementing a much more amenable routing protocol named Hazy-Sighted Link State (HSLS), and then, later, implementing a modification to it named Adaptive Hazy-Sighted Link State (A-HSLS). They estimate that the scaling properties of the hazy-sighted link state family of algorithms provide the ability to scale to thousands or tens of thousands of nodes in a densely packed metropolitan network. Routing metric As with the routing protocol, CUWiN is also experimenting with a new routing metric introduced by the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology named Expected Transmission Count (ETX). ETX allows links to be weighted based on the performance of the link experienced over time. The ability to so weight wireless links is needed due to the dynamic nature of physical environments. Where a tree in the winter has no leaves, a wireless link passing through it will be strong. In the summer, the leaves will have grown back, causing the link to have a lower capacity. ETX allows a node to dynamically adapt to the quality of each link, and HSLS/A-HSLS allows nodes to scale their knowledge of the network's topography relative to the distance between nodes. PROJECT ARCHITECTURE The CUWiN project consists mainly of two subgroups: one is directly concerned with the build-out and maintenance of the network in the Champaign-Urbana community and the other is directly concerned with the development of the platform and all that entails. Core Members Executive Director: Sascha Meinrath Chief Engineer: David Young Outreach Coordinator: Ross Musselman Senior Network Engineer: Daniel Meredith Network Engineers: Matthew Isaacs, Joshua King Senior Software Engineers: Bill Cominsky, Bryan Cribbs, Zach Miller, Paul Smith, Brandon Bowersox, Garrett D'Amore User Support & VoIP Coordinator: Stephane Alnet Policy Advisors: Victor Pickard, Ben Scott Project Webmasters: Steven Mansour, Chase Phillips CUWiN Interns: Tom Wiltzius Development Team: cu-wireless-dev@cuwireless.net Partners CUWiN receives a large amount of assistance in software testing from the Center For Neighborhood Technology . They are building a Community Wireless Network in west Chicago , Illinois using the software CUWiN produces. Wireless Africa Programme Of The Meraka Institute managed by the CSIR -- The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (in South Africa). The City of Urbana, IL. UIUC -- The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Tribal Digital Village. Wireless Ghana. FUNDING HISTORY
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