Wireless goes wired, but all is well on the wireless front

From What The Wiki?!

Walking around in the Wireless Village, what immediately strikes the eye is the familiar tangle of wires. Wires? Wasn't this supposed to be a Wireless Village, only power cords needed? Yup. But the wireless set-up failed, so back to the umbilical cord they went.

'It's the hacker gathering's pig's cycle: at HAL, it finally went well, now four years later, it failed.' People are already coming up with new plans for an improved wireless set-up for the elusive next event, HEX 2009.

But appearances are deceiving. While visitors indeed can't get wireless, the other goal of the Wireless Village was fully met: to improve meshing. When wireless access points are in one another's vicinity, wireless often gets screwed up: you run out of frequencies. Meshing is supposed to solve this problem by having all machines act as both sender and receiver, but so far, the protocol is unreliable.

When more than a hundred access point are near one another, machines start acting really nervous when a point drops out. The improved meshing protocol is meant to solve this and will change these hundred computers into a self-organizing group.

Visit the Wikipedia page on wireless mesh networks.

A bit like WhatTheHack itself, you'd say.

story submitted by Karin Spaink

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