Most of the roofnet team is on sabbatical at Meraki Networks. Note: the Roofnet team is not involved with the City of Cambridge/MIT wireless project. Please contact the IS department if you are looking for information about the city-wide network.

Roofnet is an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL which provides broadband Internet access to users in Cambridge. There are currently around 20 active nodes on the network, which you can see using our real-time connectivity map.

Roofnet is part of our research, which includes link-level measurements of 802.11, finding high-throughput routes in the face of lossy links, adaptive bit-rate selection, and developing new protocols which take advantage of radio’s unique properties. We have made all our software available for public use. The easiest way to run our software is on the Netgear WGT634U.

Join the network! If you live on Mass. Ave. near Central Square, you’re welcome to join Roofnet; see the Central Square page for more details.

Things you can find in this wiki:

• Installation: how to install the standard Roofnet kit that you picked up at our lab
• Trouble-shooting: how to repair a standard Roofnet installation
• Software: How to get our software and source code to run on your hardware
• Map: Real-time status of the MIT Roofnet
• RouteStatus: The routing tables of the Roofnet gateways
• Publications: Papers describing network characteristics and routing protocols, including talks and trace data
• Hardware: The evolution of our hardware and testbeds
• Design: Practical design document describing the current network
• Tent City: A Roofnet deployment in downtown Boston
• NetEquality: A non-profit organization deploying networks in low-income areas of Portland, OR.
• Links: Links to similar projects
• Interesting Things: Observations about wireless networks

We have developed a wide variety of software, all of which is publicly available as open source. First, you can download our routing software and join the existing Roofnet (or start your own community network!). The latest release is now available as a LiveCD, a set of precompiled binary modules and as source code.

Other software we have developed along the way:

• madwifi.stripped is a device driver for Atheros chipsets which allows you to send and receive pure 802.11 frames, as opposed to 802.3 (normal ethernet) frames. This allows you to build your own access point with specific policy or algorithms.
• Click The elements/wifi collection contains wireless specific elements (modules) for use with wireless devices, such as per packet bitrate selection, per received packet signal data, and transmission failure notification.
• Srcr is the routing protocol we’ve developed in order to find good paths despite generally low-quality radio propagation.

E-mail roofnet-hackers@pdos.lcs.mit.edu if you have questions about or work. If you’d like to stop by, we’re located in the Stata Center, Room 32-G980.

Dan Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Robert Morris

alumni: Ben Chambers, Douglas De Couto

We thank the following for supporting Roofnet: NTT Corporation under the NTT-MIT collaboration, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and the Project Oxygen partners.

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