Tunnelling IP traffic over the Serval Overlay Mesh

We have been asked a number of times over the past few years if it is possible to carry IP traffic over a Serval Mesh network.  

Our answer has always been along the lines of "yes, you could in principle tunnel it, but we haven't added support for it, and we have other tasks higher on our priority list."  Thanks to a research agreement with the New America Foundation's Commotion Wireless project, and a lot of excellent work by Jeremy, this has now changed.  

We are now able to tunnel IP traffic over the newly implemented Mesh Streaming Protocol (MSP).  MSP is kind of like TCP for Serval Mesh, in that it provides reliable in-order delivery of a data stream.  It isn't exactly like TCP, however.  For example, we intend to add a kind of hybrid mode where it tries to reliably deliver traffic, but is okay with missing the occasional packet if it will delay the whole stream too much.  That sort of feature is good for streaming live audio, for example.

To tunnel IP traffic over a mesh we need more than just MSP, we need some sort of port-forwarding between IP and MSP, in other words a protocol converter.  We also need a proxy server, and ideally, some sort of access control mechanism to decide who can use the service.  It would also be great to have an automatic service discovery mechanism.

Jeremy has implemented all of these things, as can be seen in the video below.

Talking about the access control, one of the nice things about the Serval overlay mesh protocols is that node addresses are public keys.  This means that you can reliably limit services to a particular node, just by filtering on network address, because no one can spoof the network address of any other party.

Another happy side effect is that all traffic over the tunnel is automatically end-to-end encrypted.  As can be seen in the video, there is nothing the user needs to do in order to get the encryption.

Stopping Samsung Galaxy S2 data partition filling up

We have a number of Galaxy S2's that we use for Serval.  Some of those we keep "stock", so no root or anything fancy, for testing Serval Mesh on. The one of those I use as my day-to-day phone has recently been filling up the internal storage so that I couldn't install even small apps, even though I had very little installed on the phone.

After a bit of digging around, I discovered that this can be fixed by dialling *#9900# and then choosing the option to delete logcat.  Suddenly my phone was back to having 1.6GB of free space on the internal storage :)

Hopefully this will help others who encounter the same problem.

Humanitarian UAVs

A good friend pointed me to this blog post this morning about the use of UAVs in Humanitarian contexts:

http://irevolution.net/2014/05/01/intro-to-humanitarian-uavs/

This is something that we have been thinking about for a while, and talking to a few folks about, including Patrick (the author of the blog).

We agree that Serval's store-and-forward Rhizome file distribution service seems a good fit for this kind of use case.  It would allow UAVs to opportunistically transfer data between them while in flight whenever they were able, and similarly to opportunistically and automatically downlink data whenever in range of a suitable base station (which could just be a mobile phone someone is carrying).

All up, this could make it very feasible to collect imagery, cellular signal strength maps and other useful data in a fairly automatic and continuous basis, especially if combined with some intelligent flight control and coordination software.