Decentralized administration concepts for wireless community mesh networks Thomas Huehn‡ ‡Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany {
[email protected]} Abstract—The lack of widely available broadband internet mesh network has two main clouds per village with a high access available in all parts of Germany was the main motivation density of nodes running all on the same channel, channel to build community mesh networks to share ADSL lines. As many 1 (2412 GHz) in 802.11g-only mode. All mesh nodes are are unable to easily obtain an ADSL line, we built a wireless mesh network covering our two home villages. Singe we began, we equipped with an omni-directional antenna mounted to be have included 60 households running their own 802.11 wireless outside of the roof. A singe ADSL line, serving 6000 kBit/sec routers based on commodity hardware on rooftops within the downstream and 520 kBit/sec upstream, is the only Internet unlicensed 2,4 GHz frequency band. But how would someone gateway we are currently using and sharing between us. The administrate such a network consisting of 60 different ”micro” Fig. 1 represents the topology snapshot from 28th of April 09 providers without having a central administration instance? This paper describes the mechanisms that make our decentralized based on OLSR [2] routing table calculations. administration concept a trust-based, efficient, and scalable so- lution for community mesh networks. We then describe the main concepts of how to deploy new OpenWRT based firmware-images in a decentralized manner. We then detail the most challenging aspect of the project, granting access for mobile devices among the entire mesh distributed among the node owners.