User:Mchua/Volunteering/Networking

Hi there - thanks for your interest!

What's your wiki(.laptop.org) username?

What school are you at? There might be other OLPC folks in your area (if you're in Boston, the OLPC office itself is in your area).

If you're interested in grid and distributed computing, you'll want to join the networking mail list (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/networking) and introduce yourself; the people there can point you towards papers and technical resources. Michail Bletsas is the head honcho where networking is concerned.

It sounds like you're more interested in the software than the hardware, but if you need a physical machine to work with, you can apply for a dev machine loaner (or two) at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_program - or buy some for yourself at http://xogiving.org (probably faster, as the engineers are hosed at the moment; code freeze is in two days).

Peripheral devices for connectivity (USB peripheral that connects to a cell phone network a-la Fonero (fon.com)) are also a hot topic, but that's probably more suited to an electrical engineering masters.

Another project that didn't make it through to first release but would be *great* to have happen for the next one is to get a small embedded webserver working on the laptop, over the mesh, so that children can publish webpages and share files easily. Ivan Krstic was supposed to do this, but he's rather busy with security at the moment. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1267

If you're interested in working on possible software interfaces to a mesh, Polychronis' mesh view project might be of interest - iirc, there hasn't been a lot of academic work done on this (and personally, as an electrical engineer, I'm curious how much communications engineering stuff can be explained and maniuplated by kids with no formal knowledge of antennae, mesh, etc. with the right software interfaces. http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/

Thibaut Lamadon has another cool mesh-related software project, an online messageboard - last I heard, it works, but I'm not sure whether active development on it has continued. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Board

There's also the gigantic task of making mesh development easier to do - a lot of programmers are having a hard time getting into this new paradigm of networking, since mesh networking is no cakewalk to implement. Developing tools and tutorials for them would be an incredible point of leverage. There's something called Tubes in Python thanks to Lincoln Quirk and others this summer, but documentation and other tools are sparse.

Hope this is a good starting point. Some links of possible interest, in case you haven't found them all yet:

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Networking
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_FAQ
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Security
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Forwarding_Table

I'm often online as mchua in the IRC channels (see wiki.laptop.org/go/IRC) and as mel_chua on skype.