Self-Organization in Community Mesh Networks The Berlin RoofNet

A community network must be usable for inexperienced end users; thus self-organization is essential. On the one hand, we propose an approach for self-organization in ad-hoc wireless multi-hop mesh networks, where the client is fully freed from such mundane tasks as IP configuration, etc. On the other hand, the community mesh network itself is fully self-organized thus no operator or provider is required. We present the architecture of the Berlin RoofNet (BRN) and a distributed realization of services like DHCP, ARP and Internet gateway discovery and selection. In addition, results of a detailed simulation and experimental evaluation comparing our distributed hash table based approach to traditional methods are presented. We show that our approach is more reliable, efficient and responsive