Editing Ends and Means (section)

====Wireless Mesh====
Wireless mesh networks, as mentioned before, are networks where nodes are connected to one another horizontally and redundantly. Mesh nodes can connect to one or more of their peers, and not just to an upstream hub. Wireless mesh networking enables local communications without the need for a paid Internet Service Provider. Mesh technology has come a long way, but still has some severe limitations: there is no user-space utility for easy construction and management of mesh networks, and those mesh networks that do exist are used almost exclusively as means of accessing the Internet. 


At present, there are two leading algorithms in the arena of mesh routing - [[Optimized Link State Routing]], and the [[Better Approach to Mobile Ad Hoc Networking]]. These protocols have been employed and applied by a number of community networks and research groups - notably [[FreiFunk]], [[FunkFeuer]], The [[Serval Project]], The [[Village Telco]], The [[Commotion Project]], and [[Project Byzantium]].


Optimized Link State Routing, or OLSR, is widely utilized. It has been deployed by community networks such as Austria's FunkFeuer to great effect. Though recent iterations have decreased CPU usage, and improved throughput, OLSR's primary drawback is heavy CPU usage, especially in discovering and repairing routes.


The Better Approach to Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, or BATMAN, emerged from the German FreiFunk community. Its latest iteration, BATMAN Advanced, works at a lower level of the network stack than other mesh implementations, and has now been incorporated into the mailine linux kernel. It has been utilized by The Village Telco, in the creation of their turnkey mesh router, the Mesh Potato, and by the Serval project in the creation of the Batphone Android application. Batphone allows the user to engage in mesh-based telephony using ordinary phone numbers.


Other significant mesh networking initiatives include The Commotion Project and Project Byzantium, both based in Washington, DC. The Commotion Project is an effort to integrate and standardize the use of existing mesh technologies on a variety of hardware platforms, and is part of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. Byzantium is being developed by a group of enthusiasts from HacDC, with the aim of building a Linux LiveCD that supports materially peer-to-peer versions of various network applications (web, telephony, chat) for use in emergency situations.


Wireless mesh technology has progressed over the course of the last decade to the point that it can be reliably deployed in production environments. Still, such deployments must be carefully planned and administered. The key outstanding challenge is to make it easy for anyone to build and run such a network, and to do so in such a way that users are encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity to route traffic locally. This could be accomplished by integrating mesh technologies into a nodal platform that includes sufficient radio hardware.