Currently, Lancaster Mesh is still in its infancy, and has been in development by myself, Darren Poulson, for quite a few months. It started out as an idea to share my broadband with a few friends who live my area. Whilst researching this, I came across the idea of a community mesh network and figured this would be the best way to get what I needed, and also fulfill my geek needs!

 I have been looking at a few technologies to accomplish this including AODV (Locust World), OLSR and WDS. I pretty much discounted WDS straight away as it doesn't scale as well as the other two. OLSR and AODV are two routing protocols which are both well structured, extensible, and well documented.

I initially went with this as my choice of technology as it ran nicely on the Linksys WRT54G wireless routers which offered a good, cheap platform to build mesh nodes. Recently I have been messing with Locust World which implements the AODV routing protocol and is already widely used around the world. It does offer a central configuration system called Wiana, which makes sure every node in the world has a different IP address. This however is met with mixed emotions amongst users, as it introduces a single point of failure, and a reliance on an internet connection. I am currently working on getting the Locust World software (actually a load of shell scripts and a custom AODV kernel module) running on a Linksys WRT54G. This is turning out to be quite complicated and a labourious re-writing of lots of hard to follow shell scripts.

Recently tho', it looks like there may be a possibility of an auto configuration plugin for OSLR. If this happens I may well switch back to using OLSR. Not only is OLSR much easier to use, configure, and maintain, if there is an auto configuration option then it would be a lot easier to roll out on a WRT54G.

Once I have a working image of either Locust World or OLSR, then I can start sending out boxes to any friends in the nearby area and hopefully start extending the network. Watch this space!

Darren.