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Now Get Weather Alerts Even When Your Mobile Networks Are Down, Thanks To IBM's Mesh Networking (cnet.com)
Communicating news of severe weather events or natural disasters is something mobile phones are well suited to, but if there's limited or disrupted network coverage the message may fail to get through. But not anymore. From a CNET report: A new Weather Channel app, though, can get the message through even during earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist attacks when mobile networks can be overwhelmed and may not work. The Android app, geared specifically for developing countries, uses IBM-developed technology called mesh networking that sends messages directly from one phone to another. The result is that information can propagate even when centralized networks fail. Using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks, the app can send data from phone to phone across distances between 200 to 500 feet, IBM Research staff member Nirmit Desai said. It doesn't add any more battery burden than an ordinary app, and the mesh network can be used without having to reconfigure the phone's network settings.
Really, now? Or the proverbial "now", as in "now we have done it once in a lab environment".
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
The Nextel is back!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The result is that information can propagate even when centralized networks fail.
That is the weapon. Would be censors won't like this at all
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What about using the scanning mode of the network adapter to transfer small messages? You could theoretically place a small 32 bytes message in th SSID then initiate scanning of nearby ad-hoc stations. That way you don't have to fully associate with a network.
And a dozen other mesh strategies. Qualcom's LTE Direct
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If we could somehow convince Apple to support Wi-Fi Direct instead of only supporting their own, incompatible peer-to-peer scheme, this would be a solved problem. Unfortunately, the fact that Android and iOS use two fundamentally different peer-to-peer Wi-Fi schemes makes this unlikely to work in practice unless you live in an all-iOS or all-Android neighborhood.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sadly, Google amputated Ad hoc mode (IBSS) in Android, even though that would have been the perfect method in this particular case. Not the technically inferior Wifi-Direct. Some people have tried to hack CyanogenMod on some devices to resurrect IBSS mode on some devices a while ago, but that is not so easy. I think this deserves more attention and love by devs and by Google. There's no reason why we don't have IBSS (ad hoc) mode on those devices out of the box, so we could experiment with real P2P routing algorithms that would be ideal for disaster recovery and deployment of ad hoc meshes.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Presumably, the alerts could use a "store and forward" mode, so if one person gets the alert in one town and then travels to the next town, it would start spreading again. Of course, the alert would have to have some sort of a time limit, otherwise it would keep spreading and re-spreading indefinitely.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You could repurpose a spud gun and fire cell phones off in random directions until you achieve desired coverage.
Most smartphones come with a built in FM feature so how about activating it instead, and use it for weather band radio? It's old tech, but it broadcasts for miles, not 500 feet. Its proven, reliable, relatively cheap, and can take advantage of the existing infrastructure. And we get a radio with our phone.
(If you run git blame on serval mesh's source code, you'll find my name on about 80% of the code)
Serval mesh uses Wifi and Bluetooth to share files and communicate securely. But it can't bypass google's removal of IBSS from Android. We've kept the code that turns on IBSS on some Android handsets version 2.3.3 or lower. If you really want a mesh network between phones, you can still get your hand on some old ones...
Android's bluetooth & Wifi-Direct stack are a buggy mess. It's far too easy to stumble over a bug that prevents you from getting any data through. Plus both API's are built around having the user confirm each and every connection. Almost completely useless for building a self organising network.
Then there's Wifi. Sure you can turn most phones into a hotspot... If you use reflection to call a hidden API. The carrier hasn't done anything to disable it. And in some cases, only if you have a functional cellular data service. But there's no easy way to tell if there are other nearby devices waiting to connect to you....
The main problem with this new weather app is that nobody will have it installed when they need it. Getting emergency weather information is not going to motivate people to use this app day to day and form the adhoc networks that are needed for it to work. Also this article and the summary is crap, IBM did not invent mesh networking.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
On October 4th, 2001, I read this post https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... on slashdot. The article it refers to, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub... describes "SMS Relay -- An Idea for Fault-Tolerant Communications", wherein the author proposes building a mesh-like network capability into the SMS programming of cellphones. It's still a good idea.
And that article got me thinking about what I could do to make a difference. I shortly got my first ham radio license, volunteered with ARES, then the Red Cross, and now work there.