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Then try one of the many mesh packages for OpenWRT: babel, batman, olsrd, wing

I'm working with The Serval Project attacking this same kind of communication problems from a different direction. Our focus is building a phone network with smart phones using their wifi radios. Back in June I spent a couple of days with Alexander Chemeris hacking OpenBTS and Serval's DNA together to route a GSM phone call over a wifi mesh network to one of our android phones, that was a fun couple of days.

At some point soon we'd like to tackle the problem of phone number registration on a network of OpenBTS & Serval based devices, and assist in providing a connection to the global phone network. We'd also like to replace SIP as it isn't ideal for bandwidth constrained connections like satellite links.

Look for a cheap and reliable wireless mesh networks. Forget cisco and the other big names. Companies like meraki and aerohive will sell you the hardware as well as the management service (for a monthly fee). As an alternative you could look for somebody to deploy custom openwrt based access point with a routing daemon, e.g.: olsr, batman, wing, and many other alternatives.

Yawn!

Have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_ad_hoc_network

Or make your android phone MANET aware with the following:

http://www.olsr.org/?q=olsr_on_android

It does require cooperation of people though, so get out of your caves and talk to each other ;).

Rather then use radar you'd probably be better going with a camera system and IR lamp (for working at night). To fit your requirement you're probably going to have to go with a solar powered system with a battery which all has to be tamper proof. You probably want all these systems to be connected some how so that they can feed live data in which case you're need some kind of mesh networking capability.

I'd start with the following OSS projects..
OLSR - For the mesh networking.
iSpy - For the motion detection, plus you'll probably have to modify this project a lot to compute speed.

You're going to have to encrypt the communication. If your goal is to get the government to install these then I would first talk to the police and government because you may end up making something that is totally useless for them.

Your biggest challenge is going to be with the hardware. Making it cheap enough, and most importantly low power is going to be a REAL challenge.

With all that said. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to pay people to go out with radar guns then come up with something automated?

Something like this would be more useful:
http://www.olsr.org/

I'd run it, but I'm waiting for someone else to package it for the Tomato firmware I run on my open WRT54g router :/

Three cheers for laziness!!! Yay...

<chirp chirp>

Yeah, some of them are a little bit funny. This would make a good humor post. But it's hard enough to stay on good terms with your neighbors as it is, so consider saying something nice. Like in driving, it's often stupid and dangerous to fight *ssholes by acting like one yourself, thinking you're going to teach them a lesson.

I run an open AP named "nohup", since it's on a UPS and is often the only one still running when the power goes out. (Unfortunately, Verizon FIOS's upstream UPS goes out after 5-10 minutes nowadays -- not the ONI in my house, which can putter along for a few hours, but something upstream of that)

Work with your neighbors to get a wifi mesh going: http://www.olsr.org/

If you still really want to dick with people, at least do something more technically interesting with transparent proxy hacks, such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upside-Down-TernetHowTo or running it through a Swedish Chef filter or the ilk.

At some point, I was thinking of trying to set this up on my Linksys WRT54Gv4 when moving from HyperWRT to Tomato. But it seemed like too much work... maybe if I somehow end up with another WRT54G so I don't have to dink with my production configuration.

Also, Tomato has gotten a good reputation for performance... when I recently upgraded my FiOS to 25/15Mbps, I benchmarked my unit using http://speedtest.net/ and only got about 20/10Mbps using HyperWRT, but upgrading to Tomato allowed it to max out my link... which saved me from having to run out and buy a new router or go back to the awful but beefier ActionTec router that came from Verizon.

I've also wanted to play with OpenWRT, which has an OLSRD module that takes your open access point a step further and makes it part of a mesh. But sounds like that would involve actual work :/ And it seems likely that Tomato might support OLSRD sometime soon anyway.

Anyway, my machines are pretty up-to-date... and the only one I care about is the server which is serving out in the DMZ anyway. So I just leave my station wide open. I make sure I use encryption on anything I care about going out wirelessly (I wouldn't trust even WPA much anyway). And if the neighbors or wardrivers get to be a problem, then I might set up one of my older crap wifi routers up for them instead and monitor and rate-limit the heck out of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimized_Link_State_Routing_Protocol
http://www.olsr.org/

From a brief look at the Wikipedia article, it appears that there is software (the second link is its homepage) that allows P2P routing with automatic discovery. I haven't found any notes on running this software on routers. It does work on Linux, though, and IIRC some of the open router firmwares are based on Linux. But documented way of setting it up on PCs is a start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimized_Link_State_Routing_Protocol

http://www.olsr.org/

I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.

I mean it's not like you have to dig up the road and lay new fibers. You can use wavelength multiplexing to get more and more data onto those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing

If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.

Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.

This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.

http://www.olsr.org/

DSDV
OLSR
AODV
Babel.

just look at german "freifunk" [1], they even develop routing protocols [2,3].

[1] http://start.freifunk.net/ (german)

[2] http://olsr.org/

[3] https://www.open-mesh.net/batman

for example in the eastern part of germany, after reunification, there were lines in cities that could not be used for DSL. the german "freifunk" (literally "free wireless", both as in beer and as in speech) project managed to build some sizeable city mesh nets using a routing protocol known as OLSR [1,2].

just look in awe at the leipzig cloud [3]. also, try to imagine wireless cell phone / pda mesh nets (probably doable right now with openmoko).

[1] http://olsr.org/
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt
[3] http://db.leipzig.freifunk.net/uptime/png/ -- careful, images is 3165x4206

The problem is not the backbone, the problem is bad routing caused by stupid company policies.

So finally stop trusting in companies. Companies, unless they are really small, don't act sensibly, they act based on the believes of their owners which is not nessesarily even maximising profit.

Build your own networks wireless networking with meshed routing is now practicable.
So do the following. If you don't have a wireless card, buy one.
If you have a wireless card, set it to ad-hoc mode, ESSID "freifunk". Then assign it an IP-Adress in the 10.(channelnumber+100).x.y/16-Range and start OLSRd which you can get over http://www.olsr.org/ Set the LinkQualityLevel option to 2 and start it. Obviously if you already found another ad-hoc network named "freifunk" feel lucky you can connect to that person.

What OLSRd does is it creates routing tables. This will automatically find the best routing between 2 points.

If you have any questions, ask me.

The people doing roofnet have mostly suspended development on the project to form Meraki. Unfortunately, the ties to proprietary technology that Meraki is using makes it less interesting. However, there are projects such as OpenWrt used by community groups like Seattle Wireless (http://www.seattlewireless.net/), Personal Telco in Portland (http://www.personaltelco.net/) and Buffalo Wireless (http://www.buffalowireless.org/). These projects are using things like OLSR (http://www.olsr.org/) in order to create a mesh network on top of the OpenWrt linux distro. Perhaps these are some of the same technologies that the Harvard project is planning to use as well. It seems like it would be pretty easy to implement.

is the protocol for this kind of stuff http://www.olsr.org/

Mesh IP-routing is actually quite widespread in experimental free comunity networks theese days. Check out http://www.freenetworks.org/
Ofcause I am going to use this oppertunity to promote http://www.olsr.org/ ;-)

Well actually people aready do construct mesh networks in the "real world". And they do that even without exhausting another letter from the precious 802.11 namespace. For example, the freifunk.net initiative is playing around on a larger scale with the OLSR Ad-Hoc-Mesh-Networking-Protocol in Berlin.

You want LUNAR. It's especially cool because it uses an underlay network called selnet (ARP forwarding instead of straight-up IP routing). Also, there are a bunch of normal layer 3 ad-hoc multihop protocols designed especially for highly dynamic/mobile nets that you can install for free (I can verify that they work on 2.4 kernels, anyway):

NIST AODV
unik OLSR
US NAVY labs OLSR
CLICK modular router (contains a DSDV and DSR implementation, provides a framwork for rapid prototyping of stack behaviors)

These all might be nice for a smallish office as a way to extend and enhance the probable coverage area of the network without getting more APs.

You could get a mesh network up and running without too much cost. If you invest on 3-4 Linksys WRT54(g) devices and run something like http://www.olsr.org/ on them, then you have a running mesh network.

The wireless "backbone" could be running OLSR - as described here.