Virtual Localization


So I recently reworked my mesh network simulator to merge the “hardware” code in with the “simulator” code … so that they can share the implementation of the actual Virtual Localization algorithm. There’s some new VRML files based on simulation on mesh.zoic.org … and hopefully, in a week or so, the same code will be running on 30+ actual hardware nodes in the lab. The intention is to use the hardware nodes to provide a baseline, tune the simulation to match the hardware, and then scale out the simulation. It’ll be an interesting experiment, anyway.

screenshot

Virtual Localization is a technique for Mesh Network routing. It tries to make it easy to route packets across the mesh by assigning each node a “Virtual Location”, which can then be used for Greedy Forwarding. It is a fully distributed algorithm … no one node holds the whole map of the network, the map is spread across all nodes with each node having a small map of its immediate surroundings.

It’s discussed in more detail in these papers, but this post is an attempt to summarize.

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One of the side issues of my research work is that the mesh nodes are embedded in a 3D space.  Viewing 3D spaces should be easy — after all, there’s a huge amount of 3D rendering infrastructure in a modern computer — but for some reason it just isn’t that easy.

My original take on this, circa 2004, was to export the model as VRML.  Unfortunately, these days finding a browser plugin for VRML is not always easy … Firefox’s usually helpful plugin finder comes up with nothing. (more…)