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Cambridge's Streetlamp-Powered Wireless Network
Serpentegena writes "A joint research project by scientists at Harvard University and BBn Technologies may have spawned a new breed of Metronet. The wireless network, code-named CitySense, which will consist of 100 streetlamp-mounted nodes by 2011, will draw power off the Cambridge, Mass. public grid and be used at first for weather and pollution monitoring. The intention is to also allow 'academic researchers worldwide [...] to submit their own research programs to run on the network.' Sounds remarkably similar to the beginning of the ARPANET, except the network hosts will be running Linux."
100 nodes by 2011? That's like, 25 whole nodes every year between now and then! How are they going to manage such a massive feat of engineering?
Why would there needed to be programs run on the network, if all the nodes are is data collecting points? Wouldn't it be easier to just store the data and replicate it for later analysis?
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
During the day, they can use solar panels, and during the night, they can still use solar panels! ;)
I hear these network nodes will have flashing LEDs which will drive the local police forces apeshit.
Expect many lawsuits and unjust imprisonment.
Oh! ok nvm..
I just mount solar panels underneath the street lamps and then use the generated power to run the lamps! Ingenious!
But, will you be able to access Boing-Boing through them?
Besides, I don't think this will catch on, many wireless devices have blinking lights on them.
Anyone from SF bay area, Denver or Washington DC remember Ricochet? http://www.ricochet.net/
Would be sweet. I think we need more pollution here to get something like that too!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They've been around at LEAST since Ricochet (1994).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They're using a unique new design for the access points
How is this any different than any other municipal wireless project? I suppose it's different because it isn't intended to actually provide public wireless internet access (in the short-term, anyway).
Oakland County, MI is currently implementing a wireless network across over 900 sq. miles. Granted the free service is pretty slow (128 kbps), but the for-fee service being offered is competitive with cable offerings in the area.
The extra power from sunlight which you have ignored will feed back through the system and accelerate out of control. Every street light will become a white hot whirlpool of circulating energy until the city of Cambridge is burnt to a crisp.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I read the headline as "Cambridge's Steam-Powered Wireless Network". It was far more interesting with a wrong title. Maybe they should change the focus of their research.
I once saw a video of a severely schizophrenic man. Your post reminds me a lot of him.
Metronet, huh? Is that like an Internet for really well-groomed straight guys?
"Sounds remarkably similar to the beginning of the ARPANET, except the network hosts will be running Linux."
And it's powered by streetlamps
And it's in Cambridge
Amd it's wireless
FFS - why pick out the linux part??
The author of the article doesn't emphasize that the interesting thing about this network (besides it being associated with Haaaavard and therefore news-worthy to certain people) is that it's a distributed sensor network. It doesn't just pass data between nodes, each node is capable of creating and sharing data with the rest of the network. In fact, that's the only thing that's interesting about this at all. I mean, did Google force Mountain View to install new wireless node poles when they put in their WiFi or did they just piggyback on existing infrastructure? And, as someone else has mentioned, Ricochet networks did the whole city-wide data network thing in the late 90's.
So, if you've been looking for a place to test out your predictive models of chemical dispersion under real-world conditions, it sounds like Cambridge is the place to go.
God, I really hope this is some character you're playing. Your writings sound a lot like the Time Cube guy. Random insanity and gibberish.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Google Wifi is deployed here in Mountain View and they're also posted on street lamps. Is it just me or does this plan just not sound very impressive. Google's system is quite interesting. Every now and then there's a very massive and obvious wifi AP up high on a pole. The rest of them would be hidden inside the street lamps and all they do is relay traffic back to the other ones. This saves them from having to actually wire every lamp post.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
the only question is: will it download porn?
Interesting that you mention how this is like the beginning of the ARPANET considering that BBN created the ARPANET back in the late sixties! (and out of respect it's BBN, not BBn)
Maybe that's the rate that the light bulbs burn out at, and they're installing these things at the same time to save labor?
(I'm sure if we knew the number of total streetlamps in Cambridge, and the average lifespan of a Na- or Hg-vapor lamp, someone around here could probably compute the average number per year that would need replacement.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Anyone remember packet radio? Packet Radio predates richochet by at least 10 years.
Packet radio, however, is hardly dead -- yeah, it's not exactly impressive to tell people "hey, I'm on the internet...over a radio" anymore, but there are still a lot of people doing some very impressive mobile stuff with APRS on VHF, or long-distance connectivity over HF.
Not long ago I went to a lecture by a ham who had spent some time down in Central America building an email system based on packet radio for some humanitarian workers down there. It was a pretty neat system -- VHF connections for the local links, and then an HF connection for the long haul back to the 'States. Given that the previous system had involved writing down messages and handing them to a ham operator to transmit via CW or SSB voice, even a few hundred baud (transmitting 24/7) was a pretty dramatic step up.
Only thing I didn't like about the system is that the software is all very Windows-centric, and some of the protocols they want to use are proprietary and/or patented (which I think is anathema to the entire concept of Amateur Radio and ought to be prohibited generally), sometimes requiring very expensive hardware modems. Not cool.
But anyway, if you haven't looked into packet in a while, and this goes not only for current hams but also anyone generally interested in computers or communications, it's definitely worth a look. Amateur radio in general is in the midst of a transition, where a lot of the people more resistant to change are dying off, and there's a lot of room for software hackers to get in on the ground floor and do some neat stuff.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Your prose is awesome. I suggest to others they read 'The Orators, an English Study" by W.H. Auden. From his lofty perch the Helmeted Airman can see everything, except perhaps his own madness.
I'm going to make another margarita and fetch my copy now.
Thanks for the prompt. Over and out.
...in the D/FW Texas "Metroplex". I don't think they're in business anymore, but they used to be one of the pioneer ISPs there. One of my former employers back in the ancient days had one of the very first 56K frame relay commercial Internet feeds sold by Texas Metronet.
Cities all over the USA have been mounting 2.4GHz wireless mesh nodes onto streetlamp poles for several years now. It's bloody expensive to cover an entire city with these, you need about 20 nodes per square mile for decent coverage and the technology doesn't scale very well and tends to implode under stress and large number of nodes.
What queer mentality you
have --- to worship an old
dead Jew as God/Creator.
NO God creates himself.
No God can even exist in
our Universe of Opposites.
Opposites transcend Entity.
Entity equals cancellation
--- the death of Opposites.
Evil Educated "Singularity"
Stupid - ignores the Cubic
Wisdom of Wisest Human
and The Greatest Thinker.
No human or god can match
Nature's simultaneous 4 day
rotation in 1 Earth rotation.
No human has a right to
believe wrong - for that
would be evil thinking.
Ignorance of 4 days is evil,
Evil educators teach 1 day.
1 day will destroy humans.
OPPOSITES CREATE.
Mother and father gave me birth, not a queer jew god.
Singularity god is EVIL as
Creation reigns as Opposites.
Educators, and You - ought
to be killed for ignoring the
fact that "Earth is Cubed".
(ignored and suppressed by EVIL educators)
Hey make sure don't forget to mention linux
Actually, Ricochet poletops can be used to infer certain environmental conditions too, specifically the propagation of 900MHz and 2.4GHz signals. You can do this indirectly, by watching packet headers and tracking the paths that packets take between radios (longer hops if conditions are good), which has been done in at least one area for some time now. It's fascinating data; I hope to have pretty animated graphs of it some time soon. You could also do it directly, by interrogating each radio's node table periodically, to see the SNR and RSSI to each other radio it knows about.
Prior to Ricochet, Metricom built Utilinet, designed to replace leased-line telephone circuits for control of utility switch and pump stations. Utilinet nodes could read their own power supply's input voltage, as well as temperature and a few other parameters. If anyone ever did cool stuff with this data, I'd like to hear from them.
My homepage? What the shit are you talking about? The Encyclopediadramatica link? Yeah, it's called HUMOR, Mr. Insane Robot.
I'm saying that YOU sound like the Timecube guy in your insane rambling. I work around whack-jobs, and what you write could EASILY come from one of them.
Also, the Department of Redundancy Department bit is like 90 years old at this point, I'm PRETTY sure all the humor that will be gathered from it already has been.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Looking at their map IMO this project would be great for tracing gunfire. Just add a microphone to each unit and use the age old practice of triangulation. I suspect that analyzing the characteristics of the sound could help increase the accuracy of the suspected location and possibly yield the type of weapon.
Cambridge and MIT are already building a FREE public access Wi-Fi system called roofnet.
s /2006/02/02/cambridge_mit_plan_citywide_wifi/
They started long
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php
Interestingly harvard has stated plans to join roofnet.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/article
The notion that a few weather sensors spead out over a tiny tiny tiny land area the size of cambridge MA somheow represents something significant is pathetic. That someone actually expended the effort and column space to put this in an IT Journal aimed at corporate officer level management, (CIO's) is simply incredible.
" By Ben Ames" Watch this name folks. He's bound to produce more boners in the future.
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.
You do know that the metro- prefix has been in use since Ancient Greece, right? At the time it meant 'mother' (the name of the Mother Goddess), as in the mother city (metro-polis) of a colony, but for well more than a century has been used as an English prefix, meaning 'of the city'.
Ancient roots used to be covered in 5th grade English - sorry if I'm being age-ist and am unfairly criticizing somebody who hasn't yet covered that in school.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I happen to be one of the lead investigators on the CitySense project. It's cool to be slashdotted; and funny to read the comments from people who jump to incorrect conclusions based only on reading this fairly high-level and (admittedly not very good) article. If you want to know more check out our web page: http://www.citysense.net/. One of the big problems with popular press is that it is not targeted at folks who read Slashdot and crave the technical details.
CitySense is intended to be the first (to our knowledge) wireless _sensor_ network to span an entire city. The goal is not to provide public WiFi access; as many others have noted, there are other projects afoot focusing on that. We hope to leverage existing wireless mesh routing from projects like Roofnet and CUWin rather than reinvent the wheel there.
The main focus on CitySense is to provide an open testbed to support wireless sensor research - which means that the CitySense nodes (Linux PCs using 802.11a/b/g an various sensors) will be programmable. We plan to open up CitySense allowing anyone (even the l33t h4x0rs who read Slashdot...) to upload and run custom programs on the testbed. We envision researchers using CitySense to study wireless routing and MAC protocols; to better understand how 802.11 works in a dense urban setting with a great deal of interference and existing wireless networks; to implement new distributed services and systems; and to support domain scientists gathering data from the various sensors to understand things like how weather and wind patterns affect air pollution and particulate transport in the atmosphere. If you have other ideas of what CitySense might be useful for I'd encourage you to drop me an email.
There are plenty of research challenges to address here. The major difference between CitySense and most of the public WiFi networks is that it will be programmable by external users; so reliability is of upmost concern. We'll need to develop some form of sandboxing to prevent users from hogging resources; and come up with appropriate policies for controlling access to the radios and sensors. Another major effort is developing an appropriate distributed programming model to make application development easier, to deal with failuree gracefully, and to automate software updates across the testbed. We think it's pretty cool stuff to be working on. Thanks for your comments.
He sounds like he RTFA. :)