Quartely Reports

Strategic

Three year technology roadmap

A three year road mapping exercise has been completed and published on the wiki.

This workshop established what we have achieved, where we have come from and our vision. The vision is to make a significant contribution to connecting 450 million people sustainably in rural Africa through wireless mesh and other technology with a community grown philosophy. Three product offerings together with the development of their feature sets over a three year period were developed.

• Africa mesh node (Multi radio node with customized hardware and specialized firmware)
• DIY mesh kit (Low cost single radio node available off the shelf with specialized firmware)
• WISP in a box (A custom OS distribution which allows users to establish a wireless ISP business)

Stakeholders & Events

• DIY Manual: Version 1 of a DIY mesh manual has been produced to help wireless practitioners in the field to quickly and easily build a low cost mesh network. This manual was used in training workshop with Linknet, Zambia.

Collaboration

• Pretoria Wireless Project (PWP)

We have had discussion with PWP which is an open access wireless network which spans a large part of Pretoria. A technical solution to allow CSIR to peer over the PWP network and visa-versa has been established. This agreement will allow a far larger group of CSIR staff and other Pretoria Wireless users to connect to each other.

• Linknet

A training workshop and field visit to our Peebles valley mesh project was held with Linknet, Zambia. Linknet seek to provide cost based building, operations and maintenance of targeted and tailored communications infrastructure and services for special interest groups in rural areas of Zambia. Linknet collaborate actively with TNO-ICT in Holland and make use of ICT expertise available in TNO. This collaboration will:

• Provide another test case for a large deep rural mesh network in Africa
• Expand our network of partners with similar goals of building sustainable rural wireless networking
• Serves as an output and feedback point for our mesh product offerings.

Research

• 1.JOHNSON, David, and LYSKO, Albert, Comparison Of MANET Routing Protocols Using A New Grid Based Test Bed Environment. Submitted for publication to a special issue on "Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks" of the Mobile Networks and Applications, of the Journal of special issues on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing, Springer US, Jun 2007.
• 2.LYSKO, Albert, and JOHNSON, David, Designing or Testing a Wireless Test Bed - Electromagnetic Perspective. Submitted for publication to a special issue on "Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks" of the Mobile Networks and Applications, of the Journal of special issues on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing, Springer US, Jun 2007.
• 3.SOKOYA, O and MAHARAJ, B.T., Performance of Super-Orthogonal Space-time Trellis in a Multipath Environment”, accepted for AFRICON 2007.
• 4.NTLATLAPA, Ntsibane, “Energy-Efficient Wireless Mesh Networks”, presented in WWRF18, 11-15 June 2007.
• 5.Karem, T and Chan, A., “A Low-Cost design of Next generation SONET/SDH networks with multiple constraints”, accepted for AFRICON 2007.
• 6.Nyirenda, C., “Fuzzy Logic Congestion Control in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks: A Performance Evaluation”, accepted for AFRICON 2007
• 7.JOHNSON, David, and LYSKO, Albert, “Overview of the Meraka wireless grid test bed for evaluation of ad-hoc routing protocols”, accepted for SATNAC 2007