From Netecology
Netsukuku is conceived to become the very alternative to the Internet, ready to expand anywhere in an unique, totally apart and free network, where everyone can make use of digital communication, information and knowledge, independently from any commercial or Governmental intervention, as long as any task is equally distributed upon all the Netsukuku embedded devices or PC, without any server and with a minimal memory and CPU resources, even for the assigning and resolving domain names processes.
Technically, Netsukuku is a (physical) scalable mesh network, completely distributed and decentralized, anonymous and autonomous. The software, which must be executed by every node of the net, is unobtrusive. It uses very few CPU and memory resources, in this way it is possible to run it inside low-performance computers, like Access Points, embedded devices and old computers.
Currently there are a wide number of dynamic mesh routing protocols which can create only small and medium nets because they are based on different classical algorithms. Those algorithms are able to find out the best path to reach a node but they require an high use of CPU and Memory. For this reason, the network cannot grow over a certain limit without having the nodes collapsing under an heavy computational load. Instead, the Netsukuku algorithms are specifically tuned to create a maintain a mesh network large as the whole Internet.
Netsukuku: an alternative to the Internet in a revolutionary networking tool
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[edit] Features
- Netsukuku network is distributed, not hierarchic, and highly scalable.
- The design of Netsukuku prioritizes the stability of net.
- Zero-Conf: the network builds itself, without the need of any human intervention.
- Low Memory and CPU resources need: it runs smoothly even on low-performance computers (Access Points, embedded devices, old computers).
- ANDNA: the distributed, non hierarchical and decentralized system of hostname management in Netsukuku. It substitutes the DNS. In the worst case, every node will have to use few hundred kilobytes of memory.
- Full compatibility with Internet applications: every Internet program can run inside Netsukuku without any need of changes.
- The netsukuku software is transparent: the user won't be able to tell the difference between the Internet and the Netsukuku network
- Internet compatible: it automagically finds internet connections sharing them with other nodes.
[edit] State of the art
The system is at 80% working and usable; it's written in C.
[edit] Further development
- Build the embedded wireless hardware solution: the NTK Node
- Tune the software for OpenWRT and Embedded systems
- Rewrite part of the software to create a modularized solution
- Deepen the research on the Netsukuku theory: there are many interesting areas yet to be explored.
- Do a large scale simulation on a high capable cluster
- Do in-field simulations at stress conditions
- Porting to other UNIX like systems like *BSD
