Wireless Thessaloniki is an experimental wireless community network growing in the air of Thessaloniki, Greece . It is one of the first wireless networks deployed in the city.
Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects are organizations that take a grassroots approach to providing a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.
It was founded by Konstantinos Natsakis and Athanasios Kanaris on November, 2002. The primary goals of this project was twofold:
- Development of a floppy linux distribution that would provide encryption better than WEP
- Construction of low-cost antennas and routers based on old PCs, placed in water resist boxes in order to be placed on rooftops
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a security algorithm for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Introduced as part of the original 802.11 standard ratified in 1997, its intention was to provide data confidentiality comparable to that of a traditional wired network. WEP, recognizable by its key of 10 or 26 hexadecimal digits, was at one time widely in use and was often the first security choice presented to users by router configuration tools.
The linux floppy distribution formed, named Paladir , was named after the palantíri in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , as it provided insight to other wireless routers running Paladir.
A palantír is a fictional magical artefact from J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. A palantír is described as a crystal ball, used for both communication and as a means of seeing events in other parts of the world or in the distant past or in the future.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit, but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling novels ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.
The first wireless link, connecting two points with distance of 4.5 km, was achieved on March 1, 2003, in 11 Mbit/s.
Since then, the wthess network counts more than 20 nodes sparged on rooftops of the city. It is connected with TWMN and SWN to provide connectivity with other community networks, and it is also connected through wired network with AWMN and other wireless communities in Greece.
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, also known as Hellas, is a country located in Southern and Southeast Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2016. Athens is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki.
A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection, which is based upon the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, office building etc. This gives users the ability to move around within the area and yet still be connected to the network. Through a gateway, a WLAN can also provide a connection to the wider Internet.
A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes.
The Linux Router Project (LRP) is a now defunct networking-centric micro Linux distribution. The released versions of LRP were small enough to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk, and made building and maintaining routers, access servers, thin servers, thin clients, network appliances, and typically embedded systems next to trivial.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A Live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
fli4l is a Linux distribution, actively developed by German developers since 2000. The projects main task is to provide a small Linux system that turns almost every machine into a router. The distribution can run from a floppy disk and was created with the aim of simple configuration and support for older hardware.
A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. It is also a form of wireless ad hoc network.
Coyote Linux is a small distribution of Linux, including the operating system and the necessary services for a firewall/router, intended for easy NAT sharing of an internet connection with a single IP address among many computers on a local network, using spare "commodity" hardware. The project was originally started in 1998 to provide a very simple way of creating a Linux-based firewall system for systems with broad-band Internet connections. Initial versions of Coyote Linux had both a Microsoft Windows program and a set of shell scripts for Linux to create the firewall boot-disk.
Operating systems based on the Linux kernel are used in embedded systems such as consumer electronics.
A wireless router is a device that performs the functions of a router and also includes the functions of a wireless access point. It is used to provide access to the Internet or a private computer network. Depending on the manufacturer and model, it can function in a wired local area network, in a wireless-only LAN, or in a mixed wired and wireless network.
A computer network is a digital telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources. In computer networks, computing devices exchange data with each other using connections between nodes. These data links are established over cable media such as wires or optic cables, or wireless media such as Wi-Fi.
LinuxMCE is a free and open source software platform with a 10-foot user interface designed to allow a computer to act as a home theater PC (HTPC) for the living-room TV, personal video recorder, and home automation system. It allows control of everything in the home, from lighting and climate to surveillance cameras and home security. It also includes a full-featured VoIP-compatible phone system with support for video conferencing.
Extremely Opportunistic Routing (ExOR) is a combination of routing protocol and media access control for a wireless ad hoc network, invented by Sanjit Biswas and Robert Morris of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and described in a 2005 paper.
A very similar opportunistic routing scheme was also independently proposed by Zhenzhen Ye and Yingbo Hua from University of California, Riverside and presented in a paper in 2005.
Previously open source, ExOR was available in 2005 but is no longer obtainable.
The broadcast and retransmission strategies used by the algorithm were already described in the literature. ExOR is valuable because it can operate available digital radios to use some previously impractical algorithmic optimizations.
floppyfw was a Linux distribution running BusyBox to provide a firewall/gateway/router on a single bootable floppy disk, but was later available in CD format.
The Wireless Amateur Network of Amaliada aka WANA, is a 5.4 Ghz wireless network located in the City of Amaliada. The network links many users from several areas of the town and suburbs as it offers broadband services always by encountering the settings for safe telecommunications as they are defined by Greek National Board of Telecommunications and Posts. There are over 40 similar communities in other cities of Greece, a statistic information that makes Greece a pioneer in wireless networking. WANA is a non-commercial, scientific and technological club. The full appellation of it is "Wireless Amateur Network of Amaliada" or in Greek "Ασύρματο Ερασιτεχνικό Δίκτυο Αμαλιάδας" which was established in 2006 with its headquarters placed in Amaliada of Ilia County. At this moment it offers free wireless access to the city community from the more than seven hotspots which they are installed around the city and its suburbs. There is also a core of users in the nearby city of Gastouni that soon will be connected with the network by a dedicated link, the wireless dedicated link with the Wireless Metropolitan Network of Patras lies in its final level.
IEEE 802.11s is Wireless LAN standard and an IEEE 802.11 amendment for mesh networking, defining how wireless devices can interconnect to create a WLAN mesh network, which may be used for relatively fixed topologies and wireless ad hoc networks. The IEEE 802.11s working group draws upon volunteers from university and industry to provide specifications and possible design solutions for wireless mesh networking. As a standard, the document was iterated and revised many times prior to finalization.
OpenWrt is an open source project for embedded operating system based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic. The main components are Linux, util-linux, musl, and BusyBox. All components have been optimized to be small enough to fit into the limited storage and memory available in home routers.
