WATD
Seamless Wireless Roaming
Background
In early July on the way back from DEFCON 9, I was considering Peter Shipley's (http://www.dis.org/shipley) talk on wardriving (http://www.dis.org/wl), as well as
the talks on open access wireless networks, like Personal telco and NYC wireless.
Wouldn't it be a cool idea to have a continuous network experience, such as a web-surfing session, while riding a bus through a series of autonomous wireless networks?
For example, the Bay Area Wireless Users Group (BAWUG) has a large list of
open-access wireless APs. However, most (if not all) these APs are standalone
NAPS, not associated into an ESS. So if we try to move from one to another
while in the middle of, say, a TCP connection, that connection would die
because one endpoint would no longer be valid.
To create a continuous experience, then, we have to tunnel all of our traffic
through a computer running NAT, which has a static IP address. Each user has
a client (which is currently for FreeBSD) which tunnels traffic to the server,
which performs NAT on the traffic and re-tunnels returning traffic back to the
client. The client uses whatever APs are available, and can move between
autonomous systems without losing *too* much traffic due to the switching.
(That said, the planned tunnelling mechanism doesn't guarantee delivery of
all datagrams, since it operates at the network and link layers. C'est la vie,
oui?)
All input is welcome. You can contact me at the anti-spam address
cerastes.crunchy.peanut.butter@cerastes.org (remove the obvious parts) with
ideas. Don't worry, i'll give credit to whoever gives me good ideas. :)
A cursory plot of the various functions and operations that the client will
perform is available here. Also, I have put a preliminary description of the protocol structure at the given link. As always,
comments are appreciated.
Status
As it turns out, someone else has already started a project for Linux
to work on something called Mobile IP. They beat me to it.
In any case, I may see if there's something for me to contribute. In the
meantime, I'll have to just not do this, and instead find another project.
Related Links
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