Community Wifi Project

Wireless Mesh Network Overview

A wireless mesh networ (wikipedia) is a communications network made up of radio nodesorganized in a mesh topology.  A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. The animation below illustrates how wireless mesh networks can self form and self heal.

Mekong ICT Project

Primary steps

• Overwrite default Operating System (firmware) on 6 Linksys WRT54G's with OpenWRT, an open source embedded Linux firmware

  • See the "Using the Linksys web GUI" section @ http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/openwrtdocs/hardware/linksys/wrt54gl

• Complete initial system configuration

  • See http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/configuring

  • Edit network and system configuration files @ http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci#configuration.files

• Create adhoc wireless network

  • See configuration options @ http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/wireless

  • Sample config for /etc/config/wireless:

  • #vi /etc/config/wireless config 'wifi-device' 'wl0' option 'type' 'broadcom' option 'channel' '6' config 'wifi-iface' option 'device' 'wl0' option 'network' 'lan' option 'mode' 'adhoc' option 'ssid' 'mekongict-mesh'

• Install OLSRD mesh routing software

  • OLSR, The Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) is a protocol to connect mobile ad-hoc networks, also sometimes called wireless mesh networks. It collects data about which network members can communicate, and then calculates an optimized routing table.

  • Follow instructions @ http://www.ubnt.com/wiki/index.php?title=OLSR_on_OpenWrt