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Wireless Networking Hardware Science

MIT Roofnet 233

Posted by michael from the can't-use-the-fireplace dept.
prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review runs a story about MIT Computer science students building their own mesh network for Internet access: 'A few weeks ago, MIT graduate student Shan Sinha canceled his broadband Internet service. Now his Net connection comes through the chimney. From a computer in the living room of his Cambridge, MA, apartment, a few blocks from the MIT campus, a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna. From there, data packets hop to another roof-mounted antenna at a nearby student's apartment. That way, from roof to roof in multiple hops, Sinha's data packets finally reach a gateway--a computer connected to the fixed Internet--at MIT's computer science building.'"
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MIT Roofnet More

MIT Roofnet

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  • More links, and a serious offer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:57PM (#6834197) Homepage Journal
    More information can be found at the MIT Roofnet homepage [mit.edu], and The Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project homepage [mit.edu]. Directions on how to get the software can be found here [mit.edu]; looks like the software is being released under the MIT license [opensource.org] (like the BSD license, but :%s/BSD/MIT/g).

    Sadly, Vancouver, BC does not show up on their connectivity map [mit.edu]. Anyone wanna trade karma for an MIT scholarship?

  • Curious (Score:4, Informative)

    by egg troll ( 515396 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @02:58PM (#6834205) Homepage Journal
    Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?

    • Re:Curious (Score:3, Insightful)

      by quandrum ( 652868 )
      Well, since this is an offical project and NOT students just stealing 'net access from the the campus, I think they'll at least give you warning. I mean, the equipment is offical university property. I doubt they'll just cut the cord on unsuspecting users....

      • Not quite... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by TWX ( 665546 )
        Apparently you've never worked for an institution.

        Insititutions routinely cut something off and wait for the users to complain before finding another solution, if any at all, for them. Where I work at, we've been changing our IP address scheme from an older public IP scheme to a ten-net, and once we felt that we had sufficiently changed enough systems, we turned off the ability to route the old public ones through our WAN. We then waited for the users to call to complain about not getting internet acce
    • Even if this wasn't a research project, there's really no reason why MIT would want to deny students access to their network and the internet from home. They probably already provide free dial-up access for students who can't afford broadband through local ISPs.
    • Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?

      What's happening already is moving off of MIT's bandwidth. This will allow non-MIT people to use the network as well (people such as myself). We're planning on running this on our RoofServers [roofserver.com] and very soon Cambridge/Boston and realise the goals of BAWIA [bawia.org].

  • Scalability? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mark_space2001 ( 570644 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:07PM (#6834276)
    This is great for dense concentrations of geeks in places like a college campus. But what kind of applicability does this have elsewhere?

    Is anyone expecting regular people to put up antennas before there's access? Who goes first? Even if many do, unless there's a critical number in a given area they'll be useless. There's not enough early adopters out there to make this work. And where are most people going to get a static access point in less than 300 hops?

    It's cool, but I don't see what else can be done with it than make it a college toy.

    • Re:Scalability? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quandrum ( 652868 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:16PM (#6834335)
      Hmm... where have I heard this before?

      Oh yeah, the internet

    • Re:Scalability? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      i think it might be economical for series of planned communities or farms in the middle of nowhere. Some thing like this could be set up easily as the houses are being built. No cables between the houses or into the neighborhood. Have redundant connection between several of the nearest houses.

      An antennae on each house, a central receiving station in each neighborhood, and peering agreements between the neighborhoods. Maintenance and internet access could be handled through civic association fees. If

    • Scalability is not really an issue - I'd have no problem setting up an antenna to *route* traffic. The problem is, who'll host the traffic? In this case it's very simple, it's MIT students and MIT is the endpoint. Because while I might accept an antenna on my rooftop, my residential DSL sure as hell doesn't allow me to run any public Wi-Fi service, nor would I want to anyway.

      Kjella

    • Re:Scalability? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by elel ( 698520 )
      It's cool, but I don't see what else can be done with it than make it a college toy.

      How about smaller college campuses? Apartment buildings, maybe? Neighborhoods?

      How about redundant rooftop connections between houses for data transfer? Take some of the existing bandwidth from the fiber running to the integrated SLIC in front of the neighborhood and then pump it out to the rooftops of subscribers

    • Re:Scalability? (Score:3, Informative)

      by geekee ( 591277 )
      I believe companies are looking at similar strategies to provide internet access to those not covered by cable or DSL. I think they want to use 802.16, however. See an Intel white paper [intel.com] for more info. The routing stregies developed at MIT may be very applicable to this technology.
    • I think this would be useful to broadband providers to start. Especially if they drive the price down a little (already I could replicate their hardware for less.. unless they are using really good anteneas) this, as the article said, would be great for last-mile connections. An ISP could put up static access points here and there and hand these out to their customers rather than running DSL or something similar. I've lived in areas with WISP's and the service and price is actually pretty good. One area I l

  • Sounds cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:09PM (#6834283)
    But I am concerned as to the Santa friendliness of this chimney internet access. Will I still be able to get my presents if I access the internet this way.

  • So now you can DOS this network ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tessaiga ( 697968 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:13PM (#6834309)
    just by tossing a handful of bread crumbs at the MIT gateway's roof antenna?

  • So if you run kazaa through something like this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HanzoSan ( 251665 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:13PM (#6834310) Homepage Journal


    How could the RIAA figure out who is who, and from what computer?

    • Same way they do when someone logs on to Kazaa from a dynamic IP on a dialup modem. Send a C&D letter to the ISP demanding the identity of the individual with that IP at that time in exchange for safe-haven status.

      Behind a NAT box? Fine. Then they'll just demand the identity of the individual using Kazaa with such-and-such a username at that time. Refuse, and you yourself are liable. That's pretty much how it works for ISPs already.

      This issue was already raised in regards to free public wifi hotsp



      • If its a WiFi mesh P2P network, what ISP?

        There is no ISP, theres just a bunch of people connected to a WiFi P2P network

        This issue was already raised in regards to free public wifi hotspots already, and in that case, its actually much more of a concern. But I suspect that if the admins don't keep logs, the RIAA will just try to hold them responsible instead. Though it may be, legally, a tough sell.

        So make it distributed, and then the RIAA will have to sue every single college student because they wont
        • Wi-Fi or not, if its not connected to the Internet, I don't think you have a lot to worry about. My point was that this issue is real, but has nothing to do with Wi-Fi mesh networks. Your definition of the network that's crucial here is that it be not connected to the Internet.

          And, yes, I know about the students at RIT (or was it RPI?). But that was still a high-profile public network where information was available to the RIAA. Keep it between you and your friends, and you don't have a lot to worry abou


          • What will stop people from using WiFi for filesharing? WiFi will become its own internet.

            And, yes, I know about the students at RIT (or was it RPI?). But that was still a high-profile public network where information was available to the RIAA. Keep it between you and your friends, and you don't have a lot to worry about.

            Oh, yeah, and the RIAA doesn't really care, because your friends don't have enough music that they're really bothered. But how is this different than just sharing on a private LAN or usin
            • This isn't technological warfare. It's legal. The technology is largely incidental.

              I say this because the RIAA would most likely first sue the providors of the network. Now, I said, they may not have a great legal case. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't try, and who's going to spend the money to find out.

              Freenet is already at this point--in refrence to untraceability--although usability is low. The RIAA has largely avoided Freenet because its not commonly used like Kazaa is. No reason to worry about

      • nah.

        Just tell them that the virus did it [theinquirer.net]. If you make sure to run your firewall on an insecure OS, you can also claim that the virus ate your data, or that it was lost in your weekly reinstallation of said os.

        heh. for once, a good excuse NOT to run a secure os.
    • "How could the RIAA figure out who is who, and from what computer?"

      Subponae MIT for their research data.
  • ...and yet I get internet access through an antenna directed at a local school, which in turn hops back to my father's office.

    I guess I'm just not cool enough...

  • The beginning of a true Mesh network? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quandrum ( 652868 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:13PM (#6834314)
    Could this be the start of a true nationwide mesh network?

    I could imagine this spreading out farther and farther across Boston. The other colleges could add in some of their fat pipes. And with the way the east coast has become some kind of giant megalopolis, it could spread down into Providence, Hartford, New York, Philly, Baltimore, DC.

    It'd be interesting to see how far we can grow a wireless grid network. What kind of latency would this kind of network have? Probably too high for gaming..
    • Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...because they are sort of a switch, and have to fiddle with identifying MAC addresses and such. I looked at this for a local network of mine...but with three hops, latency probably would near 500 ms. I don't have experience with this, can anyone tell me that has done this?
      • Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...

        Whenever I've measured latency in WiFi it has typically been under 0.5ms; latency can be much worse with poor reception due to retries. I can't comment on that particularly product since I haven't used it but I would be very surprised if it was that high.

        I don't have experience with this

        So where did you get the numbers from?

        • I got my numbers from a Linksys customer service rep. I was discussing running a telephone system through to WAP11's...and he told me that a single unit in point-to-point outside use over the distance I was talking about (1 mile of clear space) would generate 30ms of latency on average. I would imagine this has a LOT to do with interference and retries, since I am well aware of the fact that the mile of distance is covered in 1/186282 seconds. I was asking them about chaining three WAP11's together, and
      • food for thought.

        wireless connectivinty travels at the speed of light(inn an atmosphere). Wire connections travel at the speed of light(through a contuctor), Wired connections have farther to travel and wireless has less distrance to travel(shortest path is a straight line).

        so, wireless is FASTER at delivering data, any latency comes from the processing speed of the processor in the wireless device, which is similar to ethernet. That means their is no latency advantage to wired connections.

        wireless get
      • also, distance is of little importance to latency. :
        ligh travels at 299792458 m/s
        so in 1ms, light travels 299792 meters, or 300Kilometers. so a 1 kilometer run, plus reply time takes .06ms.

        it would litterally require that the access point be in space to significantly effect latency on transmition.
    • It'd be interesting to see how far we can grow a wireless grid network. What kind of latency would this kind of network have? Probably too high for gaming..
      Not to mention bandwidth.

      Mesh networks are a dumb idea. "Hey, I have an idea, let's redo our national road system with ONLY residential streets! Then we wouldn't need any overpasses or onramps!"

      • Mesh networks aren't a dumb idea. It'd just be a dumb idea to design them to use the same scheme for local routing and distant routing. As long as you have the sense to tie together local meshes by some more effecient means to other local meshes it's a perfectly sensible design. Changing the basic layout of the Net in such a way may require changing some usage habits but it works just fine and with work like this going on will no doubt get better over time. In the future I think people will keep a lot more
    • "Could this be the start of a true nationwide mesh network?"

      No.
    • " Could this be the start of a true nationwide mesh network? "

      Such a network would have horrible latency (just multiply the range of divide the distance by the 802.11 range and multiply this muberof hops by the latency through a node) and possibly bandwidth (depending on the mesh density and usage). It's useful as a last mile solution, but fiber is hard to beat for latency and bandwidth.

  • How about this Idea. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HanzoSan ( 251665 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:15PM (#6834329) Homepage Journal


    Could a wireless mesh network such as this, then allow voice communication?

    Say I wanted to call someone across town via a wifi phone, could I connect to the wifi network and have unlimited free phonecalls? I think that would be even more useful than the internet.
    • Could a wireless mesh network such as this, then allow voice communication?

      Try it [pgpi.org]


      • Well, once WiFi becomes popular, hahaha the same movement which is destroying the record companies will destroy the phone companies, especially cellphones. I mean I can see WiFi completely replacing the telephone for most situations.

        I can also see myself outside walking around and talking on my wifiphone.

        • After I got my first cellphone and found out my house was in roaming (grrr) I starting building such a project. With my limited resources the phone was more the size of a PDA (based off LART: http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/) but that was still pretty cool. Even with a laptop and some VoIP software you can try this out. I was using Jabber for making connections but you can do it using normal methods. Sit in the park with your WiFi equiped laptop near a hotspot and a microphone. The main problems so far are laten
  • Those spunky MIT kids! They got moxy, I tell ya!

  • Could be used on cellphones, too. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by immel ( 699491 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:16PM (#6834336)
    A similar system could be used to extend the range of cellphone services. You wouldn't have to be near an actual tower, just near a wireless node that is near a tower. In fact, cellphones themselves could possibly be used as nodes in a computer system, communicating to the computers via bluetooth or a similar wireless standard.
    • My cellphone gets 120 hours of standby time but only about 160 minutes of actual talk time. I, for one, will not sacrifice nearly a week's worth of standby time just so I can relay between a tower and some guy out in the woods for a couple of hours.
    • Not really.

      Cell phones, for various reasons, are not a good use of this. Partly for security purposes. If your cell phone packets are transmitted (or worse internet packets) to other phones, they can be tapped and utilized. This can be secured, but requires that we implement yet another level of complexity, making it that much harder to secure.

      Secondly, as someone else mentioned replying to this idea, battery life is an issue.

      Other problems, such as frequency, multiple carriers, and even the tech used

  • Mesh Networks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KingDaveRa ( 620784 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:18PM (#6834345) Homepage
    I like the idea of mesh networks. Its like GPL, only for your data.

  • It's the right way... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:26PM (#6834380) Homepage Journal
    I think the future of the net is like this: when every wireless device is a router - so you're almost never out of range, no matter where you are - simply the signal is sent to the nearest neighbour and then relayed to the next etc, till it reaches some fixed broadband access point, and then again "hops" over several people's cellphones, webpads, home PCs, car computers etc, till it reaches its destination.

    It's the future... but it's a far future :)

  • Internet, power, water... it is all good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Goyuix ( 698012 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:32PM (#6834400) Homepage
    Reminds me of a story from about 9 months back or so. A local University noticed strange power usage from one of their lines, and after tracing it down for awhile noticed that a house next to campus had somehow hooked up to the university power grid.... basically "free" power for the last twenty years or so. The beauty of it was that they denied knowing about as the house had changed owners and attributed not seeing a power bill to some strange reason... And along those same lines, my wife's grandparents live right next to a gold course and one of their neighbors got busted a few years back for tapping into their water lines and using them for their lawn. Can you really blame them on this one? one lawn is a drop in the bucket compared to a full golf course.... Internet, power, water... it is all good
    • >> ...my wife's grandparents live right next to a gold course and one of their neighbors got busted a few years back for tapping into their water lines and using them for their lawn. Can you really blame them...

      Sure, I can blame them. They stole the water. Morality isn't measured on a sliding scale that gives you a pass if you steal something that is both tempting and available. Your wife's grandparents, I think, displayed a lack of moral character.

  • Fire in the hole... (Score:5, Funny)

    by EdMack ( 626543 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:34PM (#6834408) Homepage
    So waht happens when the parents light a nice warm fire? Hehe, it's fiewire then.
    • I give him points for getting this to work, but c'mon, is he never going to use the fireplace?

      Sure, he's got net now, but he is effectively out one fireplace.

      He could have just drilled a hole and run it up the side of the house. Jeebus.

  • Weather forecast: Thunderstorms (Score:5, Funny)

    by Breeze99 ( 320792 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:40PM (#6834444)
    The weather forecast for the area [ http://ma.weather-forecast.ws/cambridge ] predicts thunderstorms. I guess wireing the chimneys will make this project serve as a physics lesson as well as a Internet connection.
    Zap!

  • Random Trivia Note (Score:5, Interesting)

    by portnoy ( 16520 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:41PM (#6834449) Homepage
    Just in case anyone's wondering, yes, the professor Robert Morris mentioned in the article is in fact the same Robert Morris who wrote the 1988 Internet Worm.

  • Cute, but is it secure? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrnArmadillo ( 697378 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:41PM (#6834450)
    The only thing I'd worry about here is whether or not you'd be opening yourself up to man in the middle attacks. I mean, WEP isn't THAT secure, and if you could get yourself between the last antenna and the computer center, you could conceivably get your hands on a lot of data....

  • I've used the system, and it works great (Score:5, Informative)

    by fname ( 199759 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:50PM (#6834494) Journal
    My friend is a post-doc at MIT, and he installed Roofnet. Previously, he had been using a Wi-Fi connection that a neighbor was "sharing." The problem was that the signal was not very strong. Now, it's great! I used it to stream my iTunes collection from my PowerMac G4 in California, all the way to MIT, across Roofnet (via probably 3-4 jumps), to the roofnet router, which was connected to his G4 laptop; the laptop was set up as a wireless access point, and everything worked fine! The limiting factor was actually the upload speed of my DSL.

    Anyways, it's a real-world technology that really works. It's still in it's infancy, and I'm sure it will move forward in fits (crackers & bandwidth hogs) and bursts (multiple, independent gateways to the internet). If this becomes easy to use & seamless, this could be technology that finally brings broadband to the masses, cheaply.

  • local content (Score:4, Interesting)

    by entartete ( 659190 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @03:52PM (#6834505)
    while it's a neat way to provide access to the internet, the most interesting part of it to me would be how you could use a network such as this to provide access to servers/services running on the local mesh. community broadcasting using streaming servers or local interest web pages and the like.

  • Joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by msl521 ( 468252 ) * <m-liebman@north w e s t e r n.edu> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:02PM (#6834564) Homepage Journal
    My friends and I always joked about doing something like this when we were in college. Of course we were brainstorming before wireless networking really emerged so we came up with some interesting ideas. Like stringing an Ethernet cable across the street, using power from a lamp post to power a repeater. Or a really expensive satellite hop to make it a few blocks away. Or maybe something with lasers...

    We never actually tried anything since we figured the school wouldn't appreciate it. Just goes to show the benefits of going to a school like MIT instead of a liberal arts school.

  • MIT articles (Score:3, Funny)

    by Keltus ( 662411 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:15PM (#6834632)
    in other news, SCO articles are no longer the most popular articles on Slashdot for the first time in history. MIT articles now outnumber SCO 1337 to 1336

  • *The* Robert Morris (Score:4, Interesting)

    by imnoteddy ( 568836 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:28PM (#6834718)
    The professor in charge of the Roofnet project is Robert Morris [mit.edu]. The article mentions that congestion on the mesh network is one thing they're working on. For some reason Professor Morris doesn't mention on his web page that he created the 1988 internet worm [mit.edu] that brought the then (relatively) small internet to a near standstill, so he certainly knows something about network congestion.
    • Why would he mention it?
      His worm was bugged, and that was what caused the slowdown/meltdown.

      The intent of his program was very different than the resulting chaos, unlike todays worms which appear to be designed to disrupt the internet.
      How many of your disasterously buggy programs do you talk about? :)

  • Consume the Net (Score:3, Informative)

    by BlackHawk-666 ( 560896 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:36PM (#6834751)
    Something like this has been going on in London for absulutely ages. Check out the link Consume The Net [consume.net]

  • Don't know about you guys... (Score:3, Informative)

    by sw155kn1f3 ( 600118 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @04:48PM (#6834796)
    ... but I live in Russia, Siberia (that's not MIT :)!!!) and we have all the city covered with radio ethernet so I don't exactly understand what's new here.

  • Sharing is caring (Score:5, Interesting)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug@RABBIT ... minus herbivore> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @05:51PM (#6835099) Homepage
    The last paragraph raises the business issue that will inevitably try to stand in the way of this technology. "Most Internet service providers don't want their users sharing their bandwidth." No more than RIAA companies want you to hear any sound you haven't paid them for. The business mentality of getting everybody to buy their own everything is deeply entrenched in our economy. There is little incentive for business people to interest the public in sharing anything.

    There used to be a TV commercial showing a guy effortlessly breezing through all his home painting chores with his new Wagner Power Painter. As he puts the thing away in his garage he yells at his forlorn, brush-wielding neighbor, "Get a Wagner!" I remember thinking, "You asshole. Let the poor guy borrow your freakin' spray painter." But that kind of behavior would be bad for business. A large chunk of our economy is based on unused Power Painters hanging on their hooks in the garage.

    For community networks to catch on, someone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that not only work technically in the real world but work business-ly in the REAL real world. I mean the world where somebody is formally, legally responsible for maintaining the Big Pipe between your local net and the Internet. The world of people who yell for lawyers because their service goes down, or is slow, or their specific oddball problem doesn't get fixed Right Now! The world of insurance issues, fee collection issues, disconnection and banning issues, tax issues, responsibilities, liabilities and so forth. In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
    • [S]omeone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that .. work business-ly in the REAL real world. ... In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.

      Well, as someone whose primary email address ends with ".mit.edu", I can assure you that "steaming shitpile" is a good description of the electronic madhouse that is MIT. And most of MIT is proud of this. It's common to observe that MIT has at least one of every electronic gad
  • they offer high speed internet. I hear it's coming to a McDonalds near you some time soon, too, possibly gas stations next.
  • "a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna."

    Am I the only one who after reading that immediately thinks "what about lightning"?

  • ... why there seems to be little research on adapting this kind of technique to a new generation of radio transmission? We hear all the time about the shortage of radio frequencies. If such techniques can handle all the varied demands of Internet access, surely it would be possible to develop relay techniques for delivery of radio signals.
  • First of all, some of you are saying "yea, so what, I did this...or consume.net has been around for a long time..." -- you don't get it. It's not a traditional 802.11b network. It's an advanced mesh network, with special routing protocols, etc. The software is available on sourceforge, go look.

    What's the scalability of this thing? There are limits. I don't believe there is any way to make a single, nationwide mesh network. However there is nothing saying that you can't have multiple, partially overlapping

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