Contents |
Proposed by: google.org
Contact (name, email, phone, skype): Steve Hakusa, shakusa@google.com, Pablo Mayrgundter, pmy@google.com
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: email
The Aarhus team is:
Svend Haugaard Sørensen, shs@demosophia.net
Jeppe Schou,
Jesper Nielsen, jn@cs.au.dk
Yu Qian,
Create the inverse of the AT&T Wireless DeadZone app: A smart phone app that automatically uploads (GPS, wireless signal strength) and maps the resulting areas of connectivity
After the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, many of the Non Governmental Organizations depended on VSat terminals which suffered from high latency and low bandwidth. The costs for VSat networks are also extremely high. These Ad-Hoc networks were actually unnecessary and counter productive. Haiti had an extensive WiiMax network that remained intact after the earthquake and two ISPs allowing for competition. In addition, two of the three cellular providers offered decently robust data plans over EDGE.
Internet and connectivity have become key to NGOs and knowing where and how to setup their networks are also equally important. Our hope is to be ale to create a connectivity map to show regions of available coverage, bandwidth / strength of signal.
Outline one or more short (one paragraph) user stories/use cases/scenarios that describe how someone would use a solution to solve the problem. Alternately outline the scenario for someone confronted by a problem, and provide some options/thoughts for how technology or a hack might help them
Envisioning a smartphone app that would periodically (being careful of battery drain) and/or on demand send (GPS coords, current available networks) to a central server. The app would present a simple map UI representing strength of signal in the area, location of closest strong signal, highest bandwidth signal, etc.
Hoping for minimal user interaction to collect signal data; filling out forms would work, but that's too time consuming.
We (Aarhus University people) are working on this now, code is updated in http://code.google.com/p/connectivitymapper/
Pablo has a working system with client/server/mapping, using rhokhub as the backend here:
http://rhokhub.appspot.com/wiki/Connectivity_Mapper
This requires a slight change to the XML format used by the codesite project; the format is documented here:
http://rhokhub.appspot.com/wiki/formats/Connectivity_Mapper
If one of the code project maintainers would add pmy@google.com to the project to be able to support this backend and help maintain the project, that'd be great!
The Aarhus groups 'test' server is currently online at heroku. Where it is able to create, list, delete data like locations,service_providers,gsm_toers,umts_towers
http://conmap.heroku.com/locations http://conmap.heroku.com/service_providers http://conmap.heroku.com/gsm_towers http://conmap.heroku.com/umts_towers
we are currently working on making the java code make a proper POST in order to update the database.
You can test the data upload process using 'curl'.
curl -H 'Accept: application/xml' -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' -X POST -d '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><location> <accuracy type="float">103.0</accuracy> <altitude type="float">104.0</altitude> <bearing type="float">107.0</bearing> <latitude type="float">108.0</latitude> <location-provider nil="true"></location-provider> <longitude type="float">109.0</longitude> <speed type="float">105.0</speed></location>' http://conmap.heroku.com/locations