Re: [gaia] controversial paper for CNs

[Leonardo Maccari <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 2015-12-22 at 07:07 +0000, Arjuna Sathiaseelan wrote:
> Thanks Roger -
> 
> In a recent call with Steve Song and Jane Coffin we were discussing
> why Guifi was successful and Steve nicely mentioned the social
> structures/community cohesion are very important and Jane Coffin
> pointed out about Guifi's business models.
> 
> Was wondering if technological innovation in Guifi had a role to play 
> with too?

Hi Arjuna, 

Apart from what has been already said about the social aspects, I think
technology innovation was a key too and the paper analyses technology
from 2008, primarily 802.11a/g radios. In the case of Ninux.org, a
boost to the development of the network was the presence on the market
of cheap outdoor 5GHz MIMO devices, like the Ubiquiti M5. These allowed
to use directional antennas in a frequency range that is much less
crowded, to realize links that could reach up to 10/20km with high
throughput. The use of PoE makes it easy to install devices on the roof
and allows to separate "dummy" devices (on the roof) from "smart" ones
(in house, doing the routing). So the configuration with one broadcast
directional antenna per node, that is referred to in the paper was
significantly improved. Also, vendors use their own MAC enhancement
scheme that allows to better exploit the available frequencies.

On the security point of view instead, I'm not aware of much progress
compared to what is said in the paper, but this is also due to the open
nature of the networks.

leonardo.

-- 
Leonardo Maccari, Post-doc researcher@University of Trento
Tel: [phone], www.disi.unitn.it/~maccari, gpg ID: AABE2BD7