Pondicherry Meshnet is a peer-to-peer community wireless initiative at Pondicherry, India. We are not the first group of people to think about mesh networks. The idea has been long conceived by academicians & researchers. The motivation for initiating meshnet in Pondicherry is followed by the discussion that happened at FSFTN’s discussion platform on centralized nature of Internet & violation of Net Neturality.
Following Pondicherry, there is also a meshnet community now at Chennai which again is motivated from the same source. FSFTN members actively pushes both the community. Since the idea of meshnet can be picked up by anyone at any region they can grow independently of any organization.
Why crabgrass?¶
Before encountering this platform (crabgrass), the communication & discussions where happening at multiple places because not everyone are on the same platform.
For example, most of us where already on telegram and some on facebook, so we had group chats on telegram messenger as well as on facebook. As more and more people started to join the community, it became difficult to pass messages, announcements, documents and other materials.
Naturally, there arose a need for a platform to organize ourselves. Based on this need we started to look for platforms to communicate. We were also using the discussion platform established by FSFTN initially, but it was only a discussion platform. Our needs are more than discussion, the platform should allow us to plan, task management, documentation, chat, etc.,
We also experimented with platforms like Mattermost (a free software alternative for slack), Teem, etc., In this hunt, we found crabgrass and read their about page which is very convincing especially from the movements perspective and so we are here now.
Website¶
The website that we are building is for general public and this platform called crabgrass is for those who are interested to engage in active discussion, drafting action plans and steering the other meshlocals in Pondicherry.
Selection of Protocol¶
Many groups around the world have already implemented mesh networks for various purposes, for example,
- NASA has been experimenting with wireless mesh networks at Space programs.
- Some organizations are developing radio modules with mesh support and selling it to the governments helping them to monitor public projects.
- A group of collective in Spain called Guifi.net is using wireless mesh to extend Internet to rural areas where the traditional ISPs consider it non-profitable.
- Another collective in Germany called Freifunk is very actively deploying wireless mesh network and developing protocols like OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N Adv
- List of more collectives and mesh network around the world can be found here
Similarly, there are also multiple mesh protocols out there. Out of which the following seems more popular among communities,
List of more mesh protocols can be found here. Based on our initial observation, we have chosen to implement wireless mesh networks based on B.A.T.M.A.N ADV Protocol. There is an online study comparing OLSR, BABEL & B.A.T.M.A.N ADV which shows B.A.T.M.A.N ADV has better performance. CJDNS seems to be one of the very promising protocol that tries to implement Encryption at the core layers instead of application layers and the reason why we didn’t choose CJDNS now is that, we want everyone to participate. The problem right now with CJDNS is that it is routed as well as routing protocol, so for everyone to participate, everyone need to install CJDNS on their machines. CJDNS cannot handle non-mesh nodes while B.A.T.M.A.N ADV can handle non-mesh nodes.
