As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently presented at TEDx Adelaide, which had the theme "On The Edge". They have now put the videos up on YouTube, so here it is:
The bottom line?
Just as MP3 files and digital music distribution has changed the market place for the recording industry, so to decentralised digital mobile communications is on the verge of similarly disrupting the mobile telecommunications industry, by similarly adding value to the everyday experience of many people.
The question is, will the mobile carriers see the opportunities that change brings, or will they work against their own interests by failing to embrace the change?
SMS messages on a cellular network get delivered via the cell towers and message centre infrastructure.
On a mesh, it is possible for us to deliver messages to other phones that are reachable on the mesh at the same time. This works great, and we have had this capability in the Serval BatPhone software for a while now.
However, it does have some limitations, in particular, if there is no link all the way from the sender to the receiver on the mesh at the instant the message is sent. This is rather unfortunate, as we usually think of SMS as being the most reliable fall-back on a mobile communications network.
So we set about replicating this resilience by creating a store-and-forward SMS-like service on top of the Serval Rhizome mesh file distribution framework. We call this MeshMS, for Mesh Message Service.
This service uses direct mesh links if they are available by making use of the existing SMS capability in the Serval BatPhone software. However, if there is no direct link, then it uses a store-and-forward scheme, that asks any passing phones to copy the message and distribute it to other phones on the mesh, until it (hopefully) eventually reaches its intended destination. The cartoon below shows how this works.
The man wishes to send the message "Prepare the Zeppelin" to his hench-person, but there is no direct mesh link at that time due to the challenging topology. The message gets picked up (stored) by the compatible phone in the pram, without any action on the part of the woman. The woman then keeps walking along, and eventually the phone in the pram is able to automatically deliver (forward) the message to the ultimate destination, whereupon the minion knows to ready his master's zeppelin, to do the weekly grocery shopping, one trusts. Of course, there could be many intermediate steps, instead of just the one shown here.
The great thing about this approach is that it doesn't require a complete path to the destination at the time of sending, but can propagate progressively across the mesh as it is able, and can make use of nodes that move between otherwise isolated mesh networks, creating an asynchronous link between them where it would not otherwise be possible.
While the delay in such a service is huge, the bandwidth is also great, as potentially gigabytes of data can be transferred between nodes. One side use of this protocol that we intend to exploit is to provide an efficient means of distributing updates to the Serval software suite, so that field updates can occur without dependence on infrastructure, and with much greater aggregate bandwidth than any single-cast cellular or wireless approach. In fact, this will even allow the update of software, maps and other resources during a disaster.
We have even demonstrated it to deliver an SMS message between South Africa and Australia, using nothing but compatible phones to carry the message more than 10,000km:
This feature has profound utility in allowing the exchange of messages, files, and all manner of data in what are otherwise very difficult settings.
It also provides the capabilities required to enable disadvantaged communities, perhaps in remote locations, war zones or informal settlements, to create their own infrastructure, carrier and cost-free SMS networks using compatible handsets, so that they can enjoy the benefits of digital communications that many of us take for granted.
It is time to reflect on the past six months of Serval, and where we intend to head in the next six months.
Six months ago we did not have a developer software offering, or even a single Android application that contained all the components for Serval. Today we do.
On-site in South Africa after testing the Serval MeshMS store-and-forward SMS Service, delivering files and SMS messages up to 11,000km without infrastructure, or a continuously connected mesh.
Six months ago we did not have MeshMS (Mesh SMS service), interactive mapping, Rhizome file distribution or store-and-forward SMS working. Today, we do, and have even sent photos and SMS messages more then 10,000km between Australia and South Africa using mobile phones as the only infrastructure (more on this in a blog post and video in the next few days). See this blog entry for an infographic and video showing the sending and receiving of this first inter-continental mesh SMS message.
Demonstration of the Serval Rhizome Mesh-Based Infrastructure-Free File Distribution System, which is also the basis of the store-and-forward MeshMS/SMS service.
Six months ago we had a number of legal issues to work through with regard to giving Flinders University an appropriate holding in the Serval Project's commercial arm, and the Shuttleworth Foundation had not yet come on board. Today, we have just about finalised the details for these arrangements, with the final execution to occur in the coming weeks. It will be fantastic to get this settled.
TEDxAdelaide Presentation November 2011. (Video coming soon) “The democratisation of online music is one example where the internet has eroded the monopoly power of music labels returning some portion of that power to the general public, without bankrupting those enterprises.” Paul will explore what is essentially a Napster equivalent that will compete with the mobile telecommunication giants. He believes that the advent of powerful, programmable, portable digital devices (e.g. smartphones) are a key factor in this eventual democratisation of mobile telecommunications.
Six months ago we were not greatly recognised internationally for our work on mesh communications. Today, we are increasingly recognised as the leaders internationally in this space, which is a tremendous honour and also acts to spur us along to deliver on all the potential that mesh networking offers. Recognition has included support by the Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa), reaching the finals of the World Embedded Software Competition for University students (South Korea), strong engagement by and with the IEEE 802.11 standards process (USA and international), presenting at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and TEDx Adelaide (Australia), and also reaching the finals of the Ashoka Foundation World Changer's Citizen Media competition (international) from a field of more than 400 entrants. We are also seeing university and other partnership opportunities in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia begin to take shape. Now all we need is to be able to clone ourselves a few times over so that we can engage fully with the various opportunities!
Our plans for the next six months are to fill out the feature set that we have generated (voice, SMS, MMS, interactive mapping, file and software distribution), and add in the missing pieces, primarily the security and authenticity components that we have planned from the outset. This will take us to mid-2012 when we hope to focus on maturing all of this into a general public release, as compared to the early-access developer software we have released to date.
Adelaide Festival of Ideas, 2011, JIM BETTISON ORATION: KICKING THE INFRASTRUCTURE HABIT: [listen to MP3] "Modern communications systems use extensive and expensive infrastructure to deliver services we could only dream of a few decades ago. This works for those who enjoy peace and sufficient wealth, but fails to reach the last billion people in poorer countries, as well as those in remote, emergency or disaster situations. Now modern mobile phones have the potential to communicate directly, to form networks without reliance on any infrastructure. The Serval Project based at Flinders University is turning this dream into a reality. It is working to make communications available to everyone, anywhere, any time especially to those who need it most."
We are also looking seriously about getting advanced mesh support built into one or more models of mobile phone to offer energy efficiency and/or range improvements over the basic service.
Simultaneously, we are beginning to explore appropriate trials of the technology that if they go ahead will gain us valuable feedback, and refine the software to maximise it's utility for the general community, including in South Africa (assisting in the distribution of educational material without cost or dependence on cellular or school IT infrastructure), North America and Australia.
So all in all, the next six months should keep us fairly busy.
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:
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.
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:
Last weekend I delivered the inaugural Jim Bettison Memorial Oration at the biannual Adelaide Festival of Ideas. This was a great honour, and my presentation was well received by the audience, as was evidenced by the poignancy of their questions.
Here is the abstract of my oration:
Modern communications systems use extensive and expensive infrastructure to deliver services we could only dream of a few decades ago. This works for those who enjoy peace and sufficient wealth, but fails to reach the last billion people in poorer countries, as well as those in remote, emergency or disaster situations. Now modern mobile phones have the potential to communicate directly, to form networks without reliance on any infrastructure. The Serval Project based at Flinders University is turning this dream into a reality. It is working to make communications available to everyone, anywhere, any time especially to those who need it most.
Earlier today (Australian time) two coronal mass ejections from the sun travelling at different speeds towards hit our planet at around the same time, triggering a very strong geomagnetic storm.
For reference, this was measured to trigger a Kp=8 storm, where the Kp values are on a scale from 0 to 9, so it was pretty big. In fact, it was big enough that spaceweather.com reported that it triggered auroras so extensive they were visible from mid-latitude locations such as England and Germany.
Spaceweather.com also mention that it was big enough that it might have squashed the Earth's protective magnetic field enough to expose geostationary satellites to the solar wind and interplanetary medium. In short words, this means that some satellites risk getting fried due to this storm. We'll find out in a few days.
Geomagnetic storms of this magnitude happen from time to time, and usually don't cause big problems. However, larger events can occur that can cause considerable problems for our big-infrastructure oriented civilisation.
Another big geomagnetic storm hit in March 1989 and caused considerable damage to electricity distribution in Canada as the changing magnetic field induced current flows in the long-distance electricity distribution cables, causing some really big transformers to melt, and causing havoc with satellites.
This event showed how our modern infrastructure is prone to damage by solar events. Indeed, there are now measures taken to reduce this kind of damage by shutting power distribution down during intense geomagnetic storms so that no transformers melt. However, damage to satellites is difficult to prevent.
However, the 1989 storm was small in comparison to what the sun can throw at us.
In 1859 the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded occurred and has become known as the Carrington Event.
That solar storm was so intense that aurorae were observed in such low latitudes as the Caribbean, and were so bright in the Rocky Mountains in America that gold miners got up and began to prepare breakfast.
The electric currents induced by the magnetic flux were so intense that they enabled inter-continental telegraph lines (the Internet of the 19th century) to keep working with out their power source, while others gave operators shocks.
We have since discovered that events the size of the Carrington Event occur about every 500 years.
Both the 1989 and Carrington events would create havoc with our vast number of communications and location satellites such as GPS and geostationary satellite telephone systems if they occurred today.
Even low-earth-orbit systems like Iridium and Globalstar would not be immune as the radio interference would potentially prevent their operation by interfering with satellite-ground and satellite-satellite communications. There are also more sinister problems for low-earth-orbit satellites. First, the outer parts of the atmosphere heat up and increase the pressure, and thus drag, which can cause the satellites to lose altitude, which is bad for all sorts of reasons. Second, the Van Allen radiation belts become more active, which can cause problems for satellites.
A repeat of the Carrington Event today would likely damage or destroy a significant number of satellite, as well as causing wide-spread blackouts.
In short, that part of our infrastructure which we like to consider to be immune to disaster, i.e., satellite communications and location services, are in fact prone, and science informs us that it is only a matter of time before such an event occurs.
My point in all this is that infrastructure is fragile in various ways, and forms a single point of failure.
This is why the Serval Project is working to enable existing cell phones to keep communicating when deprived of their supporting infrastructure, so that at least local communications will remain possible in the face of almost any situation, without the capability placing a cost-burden on society.
