Private Networks For Public Safety

JonZittrain writes "Projects like the New American Foundation's Commotion are designing ad hoc mesh networking to keep communications open when governments want to censor. Former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and I argue that mutual-aid-based networks can be helpful for public safety, too, after attacks or natural disasters. There should be easy practices for anyone to open up an otherwise-closed Wi-Fi access point if it's still connected to broadband and is near people in trouble, and separately, to develop delay- and fault-tolerant fallback ad hoc networks so users' devices can communicate directly with one another and in a mesh. This can happen even while full packet-based ad hoc mesh is being figured out. The ideas have been developed a little in workshops at Harvard's Berkman Center and the FCC. Why not bring the human rights and public safety communities together towards a common goal?"

addressing and routing in adhoc mobile networks

[godrik]

I was always wondering how you achieve routing and addressing in a completely adhoc network. Let us assume that my whole city put their wireless access point in ad hoc mode even on the same SSID or whatever. How do you achieve any form of coherent addressing and routing ? You do not want to follow the ethernet technique with huge arp tables, devices are never going to be have enough memory to store such huge tables. Routing will be completely inneficient.
Any idea?