Airmesh - The Flying Mesh Network

Our “Airmesh” project was part of the students project “Ingenium” at TU Berlin. Ingenium’s goal is to provide a wireless network for communication during recovery in areas that were struck by a disaster. They want to build stationary airships equipped with routers which are connected via a mesh network and provide network access to clients on the ground.

Our task was to evaluate the hardware and software requirements for a network infras- tructure in such a situation. We researched different software and hardware technologies to be able to decide which ones are suitable for Ingenium’s project. The major aspects were bandwidth, power and range restrictions. Based on these decisions we also built a prototype of the network with three routers to put our theoretical research to the proof.

We found out that WiFi is a suitable technology for this kind of disaster recovery network and that hardware in an acceptable price range is able to handle the meshing and client connections without too much power consumption.

At the end of our project we verified our results with the Freifunk community and can confirm that our proposed networking part of Ingenium’s project should be feasible to realize.