2013-03-28 / Seamus Tuohy
Since 2009, wireless mesh enthusiasts and community networking activists from across the globe have come together for a tournament of a social nature: "Wireless Battle of the Mesh". Each battle is held in a different European location, creating a unique series of testbeds for this band of hacktivists and wireless innovators to examine the performance of the various mesh data routing protocols. Wireless mesh projects are judged on many features including network capacity, recovery, and node-discovery. The creators and implementers of protocols such as Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX, OLSR, and 802.11s come together each year to compete and swap notes and code. This year’s events will be held at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, from Monday, April 15th through Sunday, April 21st. The Open Technology Institute (OTI) sees Battlemesh as a great knowledge sharing event that has, and continues to be, critically important to groundbreaking innovation in the field of wireless mesh networking. Events like these help foster the development of grassroots community networks around the globe. OTI endorses and supports the Battle of the Mesh v6 for its crucial role in advancing the state of the art. OTI will be sending a team of technologists to the Battle of the Mesh to participate in the event’s talks and to help with network setup. OTI will also donate hardware to help extend the pool of available network devices. To see the list of the endorsers or learn more about the project, please visit the main Battlemesh website.