Decentralized administration concepts for wireless community mesh networks

The lack of widely available broadband internet access available in all parts of Germany was the main motivation to build community mesh networks to share ADSL lines. As many are unable to easily obtain an ADSL line, we built a wireless mesh network covering our two home villages. Singe we began, we have included 60 households running their own 802.11 wireless routers based on commodity hardware on rooftops within the unlicensed 2,4 GHz frequency band. But how would someone administrate such a network consisting of 60 different ”micro” providers without having a central administration instance? This paper describes the mechanisms that make our decentralized administration concept a trust-based, efficient, and scalable solution for community mesh networks. We then describe the main concepts of how to deploy new OpenWRT based firmware-images in a decentralized manner. We then detail the most challenging aspect of the project, granting access for mobile devices among the entire mesh distributed among the node owners. Moreover we argue that conventional administration concepts fail when running such a mesh network and provide new approaches to run networks where every participant has root privileges.