Monitoring and quality assurance of open wifi networks out of client view

Hey everyone,
 
My name is Jan-Tarek Butt and I am in my second term of computer science at Emden University in Lower Saxony (Germany). I am one of the students that are participating for Freifunk in the Google Summer of Code 2016. In the following post I would like to introduce you to my Google Summer of Code project. I split up the project into 3 main subjects: Mainline project, sub-projects and seminars.
 
Before I explain the three mentioned subjects I would like to give you some background information about the project in general. My project mentor is Clemens John. He studies computer science at University Osnabrück in Lower Saxony (Germany) and recently started to write his bachelor thesis. As part of his bachelor thesis he will build a monitoring and administration software for open wireless networks called “Netmon-SC” based on a previosly existing software that will be rewritten to follow a decentralised idea. The coarse structure of Netmon-SC will consist of a core module as a data storage backend that can be queried by using a REST API based on NetJSON. In addition to the REST API the core module will include a plug-In system which developers can use to easily extend the core module to build data storages for creating visualisation tools, quality assurance metrics or any other community specific tools like special administration applications.
 
My mainline GSoC project is to develop a new firmware for routers based on openWRT or LEDE. This firmware will  be the basis for an application to monitor the clients view onto an open wireless network. From now on we will call this firmware the “Monitoring-Drone”. This monitoring firmware will gather quality assurance metrics and send them to Netmon-SC. This metrics will help developers and administrators to enhance the quality of open wireless networks and find bugs more easier. The firmware will include an API package to communicate with Netmon-SC. It will also contain a small LUCI web-interface for basic configuration e.g. wireless network settings etc. Additionally to the basic settings it should be possible to integrate small plugins in form of  .sh or .lua files witch contain custom commands.This will allow communities to gather network specifics metrics without compiling community specific firmware images. The API for communication with Netmon-SC, the web-interface and the plugin system will embedded into a package bases structure. The git repository for this project can be found here.
 
Now to the sub-projects. Sub-projects are small projects adjacent to the mainline project. The first sub-project is the so called hoodselector that I finished reviewing on Mai 21th. The hoodselector creates decentralized, semi automated ISO OSI layer 2 network segmentations based on geostationary fixed quadrants for batman-adv mesh networks. It detects in which quadrant the node is in by using wireless location services and configurates the router using the settings that have been stored for this quadrant. In conclusion the hoodselector enables us to build scaled decentralised mesh-networks. It is a small program on open wireless routers on the Nordwest-Freifunk community network.
 
The second sub-project is, to create a proper workaround for building images on a multicore system instead of a single core system by using Gitlabs continuous-integration (CI) feature. This will fully automate the firmware image building process for the Monitoring-Drone and also for the open wireless firmware images from the local community.
 
The third sub-project are regular seminars. The idea of this seminars is to give earned knowledge to the public and also acquire new developers for open wireless projects. The seminars should have one or two short presentations about technical processes from open wireless networks, for instance how the hoodselector works or how batman-adv works. The Presentations will be video recorded and uploaded to the internet. After thous presentations on the seminars I plan short discussions about the contend of the presentations. Afterwards hack-sessions should do force forward the developing processes for the Google Summer of Code project and illuminate the opensource software development scene of the open wireless project.
 
Last but not least we created a project timeline. Clemens and I, will have regular Mumble meetings during the GSoC, at the middle of every month. On this meetings we will discuss the work already done and what should happen next. Beside the work on the main project we will also use the meetings to plan the next seminar that will always follow at the end of each month.
 
Timeline:
23. May: Community Bonding (3 weeks)
test and deploy hoodselector  ← Done
16. May 6:00 PM: GSoC Mumble ← Done
Refine the roadmap ← Done
23. May – 20. June: Work period 1 (4 weeks)
28. May 2:00 PM: hacker-session
  1. Presentation about the hoodselector
  2. Presentation about the openwifi.su project and the geolocator
Midtermevaluation
20. June – 15. August: Work period 2 (8 weeks)
Tarek & Clemens exams!!!
13. June 6:00 PM: GSoC Mumble
25. June 2:00 PM: hacker-session
  1. Presentation about workaround with git CI processes.
  2. actual unknown
18. July 6:00 PM: GSoC Mumble
30. July 2:00 PM: hacker-session
  1. actual unknown
  2. actual unknown
15. August 6:00 PM: GSoC Mumble
Finalevaluation
Cheers
Jan-Tarek Butt

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