Engineering a Suburban Ad-Hoc Network

Ad-hoc wireless networks are networks of co-operating users, with no reliance upon fixed infrastructure. Such networks are growing in popularity, as wireless communication hardware, both fixed and mobile, becomes more common and affordable. The Monash Suburban Ad-Hoc Network (SAHN) project has devised a system that provides a highly secure and survivable ad-hoc network, capable of delivering broadband speeds to co-operating users within a fixed environment, such as a residential neighbourhood, or a campus. The SAHN can be used by residents within a community to exchange information, to share access to the Internet, providing last-mile access, or for local telephony and video conferencing. SAHN nodes are designed to be selfconfiguring and self-managing, relying on no experienced user intervention. Thus, they are suitable for use by the general public, in ‘plug-and-play’ fashion. This paper investigates possible architectures for an implementation of the SAHN (Tyson 2005), and presents a real-world prototype. The prototype presented takes the form of a Linux kernel module, and a user-space daemon.