On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Kosta Grammatis kosta@iamkosta.org wrote:
Hi Friends- We're working on a rather ambitious initiative to build a de-centralized network for the whole of humanity. We're collaborating with NASA Ames, Deutsche Telekom, and others. Our latest campaign is to buy a satellite: http://buythissatellite.org
All that aside, the work of B.A.T.M.A.N. is incredible, from what I read you've tackled some big problems and your technology is being implemented in many places (our friends at Village Telco seem to be using B.A.T.M.A.N.).
We'd like to build a satellite network that serves as a backhaul to local de-centralized mesh networks. Local data transactions can move within the mesh, if data needs to be accessed from further away, they switch to the satellite network. An ambitious addition to this idea is to allow each device on the mesh to act as a piece of a phase array antenna.
A phase array antenna requires that each of the pieces of the array have very low-latency, low jitter communications. BATMAN is unlikely to supply that.
BATMAN's approach to routing is not suitable for very large networks (more than 10^3 routing nodes). That said, if the backhaul network setup is stable, you could use BGP between individual BATMAN islands. If you need a very large network with moving nodes, you may need an approach like SSR, or other approaches - but they are very much the subject of research.
I personally understand how challenging this may be, and my expertise is (very) limited. Is this technically possible with technology available today? What would you recommend to get this done and what can we expect in terms of an end user experience? I appreciate your time and expertise. I believe this is the ultimate end goal of B.A.T.M.A.N, perhaps we can work on this together.
-Kosta