Serval is in finals for the Ashoka Foundation Change Makers Citizen Media Competition!

It seems that this last month has been one of the Serval Project gaining international recognition as leading the mesh communications space.  First some thoughts on that, and then some of the exciting things that have been happening.

This is incredibly gratifying and humbling, and I think also says something about the value of the open development and free software model, and also about the value of pragmatism and choosing the right applications and approach.  Ultimately it must spur us onto continuing to advance not only the technology, but also its use.

We are quite aware that there are other more experienced players in this space, who have in some cases invested many millions of dollars into mesh networking.  However, the closed-handed commercial approach that many such group have taken means that many innovations in the mesh networking space do not get well known, and that people feel isolated from what is happening in this space -- which is quite counterproductive, since mesh is by it's nature a word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer technology, and that character bleeds over into how it is best used, valued, evangelised and adopted.

We are also quite aware that there have been significant efforts put into making robust mesh routing protocols and standards, for example 802.11s, and yet in a short space of time we seem to be accelerating our traction at a much faster rate.  I think that there are a few interrelated causes for this.  First, we are extremely pragmatic in our approach, and this is partly enabled by us driving a vision forward, rather than seeking consensus to generate a moderated output.

The unfortunate reality for mesh networking is that it is still in such infancy that the various components have to be well matched to perform well, and thus the traditional compromise approach to standards generation, without an working example to inform the standard, is prone to produce a sub-optimal result, and take a very long time to produce.

This is also related to the lack of clear commercial application (or more specifically, of commercial return) of mesh networking in the eyes of many companies.  This is because when viewed as a traditional network, mesh networks are very poor cousins; they have poor reliability, poor bandwidth, poor quality of service, limited range and so on. All these make it very difficult to layer existing commercial models over a mesh network.  For example, adapting Google's advertising model onto a mesh network has trouble getting the advertisements over the mesh to each device, let alone the search data.

It takes a fresh approach to mesh networking to understand where the substantial commercial opportunities are hiding.  This requires gaining an understanding of the strengths of mesh networks, rather than their weaknesses.  The natural broadcast nature of wireless networks actually works well for broad dissemination of data.  The ability of these networks to operate without supporting infrastructure allows the provision of services when not ordinarily possible.

These services do not need to be data-poor services, either.  Serval has already created a prototype mapping application that could easily support navigation, geotagged advertising by businesses, crowd sourcing of points of interest and a variety of other features -- and would continue to be available when infrastructure is not available.

In this kind of setting, the limitations of mesh networking become strengths. The limited range of mesh networks means that locally relevant data is available where it is relevant, and doesn't flood the rest of the world or distant parts of the mesh.  The broadcast nature of wireless communications allows multiple receivers to receive these locally relevant data, whether it be advertisements, maps, communications between nearby friends or otherwise.  Also, by focussing on hop-by-hop dissemination of data, the traditional bandwidth degradation of mesh networks can be significantly avoided -- at the extreme it is single-hop communications which can be performed at the order of 100mbit between nearby WiFi enabled devices, which is way faster than my home ADSL internet connection.

But back to some of the recent successes we have had in our work and leadership being recognised, including the headline of this post:

The Serval Project is one of 11 finalists from a field of around 500 entries in the Ashoka Foundation's Change Maker Citizen Media competition.  This is tremendous recognition of the value of our work in the citizen empowerment space, and we are delighted to engage with this community, and with the other amazing finalists.  We'd also love you to vote for us if you think we should be one of the winners.  You can see the other finalists and vote using the links below:

We have also made it to the finals of the World Embedded Software Competition in Korea, for the second year running.

Meanwhile, we have begun to engage with the IEEE 802.11 standards process, with Romana in Atlanta at their meeting as I type.  It continues to amaze me the generally positive reception and voice that we are granted at events such as this, and we are hopeful that we can effect positive change in the standards to better support mesh networking.

We are also beginning to form partnerships with Universities, companies, not-for-profit and other entities, not just in Australia, but around the world.  More on some of those as they mature, but it is exciting for me to see our efforts multiplied as we gain partners.  As I have previously mentioned, we are keen to not only create resilient software, but produce it in a resilient manner, and that means with multiple teams in multiple countries around the world.  While this process has begun, we would love to expand this even further, so if you are interested, drop me a line.

Closer to home, but from my perspective very satisfying is that two of our students won their sections of the departmental end of term student expo.  Congratulations to both Swapna Palaniswamy and Corey Wallis for your great work. Swapna's work has also resulted in an upcoming publication at the International Conference on Wireless Technology for Humanitarian Relief later this year, which is an unusual achievement for a student in her course.  Corey has similarly had a presentation based on his work accepted  at Linux Conference Australia in January (we also have another talk at LCA on our Rhizome mesh file distribution protocol).

So it is a tremendously exciting time, and we are incredibly grateful to the Shuttleworth Foundation, Flinders University, NLnet and the Awesome Foundation for their enabling support of our activities.

So now it is back to driving the technology side of our activities so that we can deliver on the promise.

We have two primary areas of activity on this front at present.  First, we are working to consolidate the existing software to make it generally more usable and stable.  Second, we are working on incorporating the Rhizome file and messaging system so that we can provide what we think will be a very powerful mesh messaging service, that will even make possible the delivery of messages when there is no path immediately available through the mesh, and for the sender to receive confirmation when the message has been received.  But more on that when we have something concrete to show.

Early Prototype of the Serval Mesh File Distribution System, the Rhizome Retriever

Romain one of our team has been working hard to get the Rhizome Retriever together as part of our work in supporting citizen journalism in a community in Nigeria, that I have blogged about previously.

They are already using our software in that community to make free mesh telephone calls, but from the outset the plan has been to enable them to be citizen journalists, and to share news and information in their community.

To enable this, we are making our Rhizome Retriever (Serval RR), which basically lets you pick files on your phone, and put them up on the mesh, from where they will be automatically distributed to other phones on the mesh.

Mass file distribution on a mesh is usually fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is that the available bandwidth on a mesh halves (or worse) for each extra hop that you try to traverse.

So you can often get decent bandwidth to nearby nodes, but poor or intermittent connection to more distant nodes.

Also, the more people trying to transfer things many hops across the network reduces the available bandwidth for everyone.

So we decided to make the Serval RR only ever send data one hop to the nearest neighbours.  They can then in turn send data to their neighbours later on at their convenience.

As a result, Serval RR can already distribute even relatively large files, certainly into the several mega-byte range, without great difficulty, and without making the network unusable for everyone else.

Here is a quick demo of the initial prototype of the Serval RR software in action:

The importance of communications during emergencies

Early 2011 saw the worst floods in Queensland, Australia in 40 years.

Not surprisingly, this placed significant stresses on response efforts, and for a variety of reasons, the Queensland Government has issued an interim report on the event and what responses should be made.

You can read the interim report here.

I have been reading through this from a telecommunications perspective, and found the following items:


2.24  Seqwater should give consideration to posting information about current and future releases on its website during flood events as one method of ensuring accurate and timely information is available to the public. 


This may seem like a small matter, but by making the information available somewhere where someone in the community could access it, and possibly disseminate it further, perhaps by word of mouth, or perhaps by feeding it into a crowd-source incident reporting system such as Ushahidi or the Serval Rhizome/Mapping combination, where it could be made available to others who need it.  Indeed, this process could be automated, providing a very valuable community service.  However, if the information is not shared in the first instance, then such broad and means of distribution will be troublesome to implement, and potentially disadvantage many.

In short, putting information out where the public can get to it, and make further use of it supports resilience.



5.21 The Queensland Fire and Rescue Service should ensure that rescue technicians on deployment are provided with individual radios, rather than sharing a communications pack


Presumably the sharing of communications packs is related to their cost and bulk.
Using off-the-shelf meshing mobile phones would allow all rescue technicians to have a personal means of communications that makes use of the shared communications pack, relaying traffic back through that resource.



5.29 The Queensland Fire and Rescue Service should consider isolating repeaters during a large scale emergency response. If this solution is found to be feasible, it should be implemented as protocol as soon as possible. If it is not, the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service should explore other solutions to the issue of the fire communications network being overloaded and firefighters resorting to localised networks during large scale emergency response situation.


This seems to be responding to the issue of excessive traffic being relayed across the region, congesting the system and preventing it being of effective use.  The Serval Mesh system has the potential to localise message delivery to the local teams that need it (whether or not they are locally based), and still retaining the ability to broadcast messages over the whole region when suitably addressed.

This is not a particular mode we had considered greatly in the past, so this is a helpful thing for us to discover.


7.2 Lockyer Valley Regional Council should investigate the feasibility of installing alarm-activating gauges in the creeks at Spring Bluff, Murphys Creek and other communities where communication systems are poor and there is a risk of rapid and unexpected water rise.


This is interesting for us to read, as we are already contemplating creating a very similar system for use in the Mekong River Basin on conjunction with a Lao doctoral student here in the department.  The characteristics of the system are having a local mesh broadcast an alarm to all mesh nodes when one or more mesh-equipped sensors indicates a high water level.

It is possible that those sensors could be low-cost mobile telephones connected to a device such as the IOIO, creating a very simple and low-cost solution, provided the device can be powered, perhaps using a solar panel and modest storage battery, such as an old car battery no longer able to supply the peak load required to start a car, but more than sufficient for the couple of watts required to run a phone and sensor.

"SMS alerts are also not a reliable method of providing flood warnings in parts of Queensland which experience problems with telephone coverage. That difficulty is compounded during a flood, when telephone reception can be affected by flood related power outages and congested telecommunications networks."


This is precisely the kind of short coming with cellular networks that Serval has sought to find and create solutions for, that complement the existing infrastructure.  In particular, the ability of the Serval Rhizome mesh file/message distribution system to work asynchronously, and automatically share information carried in phones as they more from region to region has particular value in these sorts of situations.

Also, the ability place local calls on the mesh, and where possible, setup connections from the mesh to the outside world offers a significant capability that is otherwise a considerable liability in these situations.

The ability for Serval technology to allow the rapid setup of a local mobile telephone network, and then connect it to the global telecommunications network using the nearest functional mobile phone tower was demonstrated in Brisbane in late January 2011, just a couple of weeks after the flooding had subsided.

We did this by placing a phone running the Serval software at a high vantage point where it could communicate with the nearest functional mobile phone tower (we used a helium balloon, but a roof top, or even a long fishing pole gaffer taped to a car would suffice).  This then allowed the phones on the ground that were also running our software to relay calls out to the world.  Here is the video we took of us doing exactly this, and watching people use it:

Photos and Update from Nigeria - and introduction to Rhizome

We have a partner organisation working in Nigeria looking at citizen-sourced journalism and using our mesh network as the connectivity among a number of camera-equipped cell phones, so that citizen journalists there can make a short video or news piece and then have it distribute automatically over the mesh using our Rhizome protocol.

Rhizome is our mesh file distribution protocol that allows user-created content and software updates to spread hop-by-hop over the mesh.  This hop-by-hop approach elegantly solves many of the problems with mesh-wide file transfer, in particular bandwidth starvation and instability of long links.

We have called it rhizome because it is like the vegetable reproductive process of the same name, because we think it is a good analogy for the way that Rhizome allows data to spread by small hops, but such that over time it can spread over great distances.

We are busy working on making Rhizome do all that the team in Nigeria needs, but in the meantime, the team in Nigeria have sent us some photos showing the mesh in action.

First, they sent photographic evidence of 10 IDEOS U8150 phones forming a mesh with our software:

10 Serval BatPhones on the mesh (and a call in progress!)

They also sent us this picture which I really love, because it shows a community getting started with out technology thousands of kilometres from where we are writing the software here in Australia.  This is what it is all about, people using and benefiting from the software that we are creating and releasing.

Finally, just a week after they got 10 phones on the mesh, they sent this shot showing 15 phones on the mesh.  This was just a case of them getting 15 phones within range, as the underlying BATMAN mesh protocol should be able to handle a couple of hundred devices without any difficulty:

One of the challenges we are looking at solving with this group is auto-update of the mesh software, over the mesh.  That is, we want to be able to load a signed software update onto any one of the phones on the mesh, and have the phones on the mesh share it automatically with one another.

This is a great idea, and the Rhizome protocol will allow us to do this, however it introduces some security challenges.

In particular, we don't want someone or some party seizing or cracking our signing key, and then being able to spread a trojan update that destroys the Serval mesh.

One approach we are looking at is making the update require that the new version be signed by a majority of keys from a pool, where each key would be held by a different mesh-friendly organisation.   The pool of trusted keys could then be similarly updated by a majority vote of existing trusted keys.

This will allow us to spread the keys among countries and jurisdictions and provide the kind of distributed resilience that the Serval Project is predicated on, and even allows the software to continue to be refined and distributed if the Serval Project as an organisation ceases to exist.

If you think that your organisation might like to be one of our key custodians, let me know.