Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 1:43 AM, John Luke Gibson eaterjolly@gmail.com wrote:
A more perfect solution (longterm) would be a network with self-modulating scarcity of addresses, in a fashion reminiscent of
it's always been a long-term goal of mine to create some form of globally-scalable wireless mesh network. to that end i tracked down a copy of the IEEE 802.22 standard as it represents the best foundation that computer scientists have yet developed, tested and deployed. range of mobile units: 5km. range of static (base station) units: 60km.
Before you spend too much time on reinventing wheels (and discovering that some theoretically perfect wheels turn or to be a bit square when confronted with reality), you should take a good at existing deployments of mesh wireless.
Freifunk in Germany is rather popular, and works rather well (although it generally is not making very many wireless links before it hits a wired uplink.
https://map.hamburg.freifunk.net/
There's the Serval Project in AU/NZ where they've done quite a lot of testing of a self-assembling phone system that uses peer-to-peer WiFi between phones -- their expectations that one ought to be able to make phone calls have been mostly ditched IIRC, as they found that it works much better if they use store-and-forward of SMS for most communication.
Related to that, there's https://villagetelco.org/
http://battlemesh.org/ is also something to keep an eye on.
Obviously, using longer range radios to run that on is a nice idea, but probably not the hard bit. BTW, I notice that in Hamburg there are people getting 5km+ range out of off-the-shelf TP-Link outdoor wifi units that cost less than 40 EUR at each end (that's what some of the longer lines are, at the south of the map above -- you can click the lines to find out).
Cheers, Phil.