GSoC project proposals

GSoC project proposals

[Mircea Gherzan]

Hello,

I'm a CS student (undergrad) wanting to do a wireless-related project
for the Google Summer of Code. 

As advised by Johannes Berg, I am posting on here in order to know the
mentors and to get a better understanding of the requierements.

>From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming project.
Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it, so I cand get in
touch with him/her?


Thanks,
-- 
Mircea

Re: GSoC project proposals

[John W. Linville]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 03:36:00AM +0200, Mircea Gherzan wrote:

> I'm a CS student (undergrad) wanting to do a wireless-related project
> for the Google Summer of Code. 
> 
> As advised by Johannes Berg, I am posting on here in order to know the
> mentors and to get a better understanding of the requierements.
> 
> From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming project.
> Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it, so I cand get in
> touch with him/her?

I think Luis Rodriguez penned the descriptions of those projects,
so he might be the best person to ask about them.  In any case,
I would be happy to mentor such a project if you so desire.

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.

Re: GSoC project proposals

[Holger Schurig]

> From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming
> project. Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it,
> so I cand get in touch with him/her?

I wonder where the list has been published?


Basically, a patches version of the old madwifi driver still 
roams better than mac80211-based WLAN cards. The latter have 
currently mostly written for "Hotspot"-operation. That is a 
laptop in the vincinity of one access-point.

In my company, I'd be in need for real roaming, as a storage 
warehouse has often 10-40 access-points and the client needs to 
know when to switch to a new one, ideally proactively. And as a 
moder fork-lift is quite fast, you'll need to be quick and 
adept :-)

Helmut Schaa once indicated that he has something in petto, but 
that was weeks ago. But maybe he still has ideas/hints about 
this.

I could help with testing things in a "real" environment, as a 
storage warehouse of one of our customers is just round the 
corner :-)



If I would have to implement it, I'd do rought this:

1) create a consistent picture of available access-points

You can do:

a) scan when needed
b) constantly background scanning
c) a combination of those

With c) I mean the following scheme:

WLAN card receives the broadcasts of the APs anyway, no matter if 
you do an "iwlist XXX scan" or the "iw" equivalent or not. So 
this information could be store into some sort of "database" 
inside mac80211.

Now consider you client is moving, e.g. in a car, on a bike, or 
(in my case) your device is mounted to a fork-lift terminal. 
That means that you have to age the information in 
your "database". Old entries aren't as reliable for roaming 
decisions as new ones. And entries that didn't get an update for 
n seconds (e.g. 5 seconds) are useless.

Also consider that still some network admins think that "hidden 
ESSID" is a security feature and turn this beast on. So even 
with a got SNR a new entry in your bss list might not be 
eligible for roaming, because the AP might have a different 
SSID.



2) Decide when to roam

You should really do this before your current connection stalls, 
e.g. when you find that some other AP is X points better then 
the current one.


3) Decide who roams

In history, we had fullmac drivers (like orinoco_cs or 
wlags_h2_cs) that did all the roaming. For some chipsets used 
for embedded or portable devices, we still have those (e.g. 
libertas_sdio, libertas_cs, the ar5000-driver). But now we have 
mostly software chipsets, so concentrate on this.

However, the fullmac driver do their own roaming. After they did 
that, they notified WPA-Supplicant about the fact. That worked 
quite well, even with WPA and WPA2.

However, I've heard many people that said a roaming decision 
should be done in user-space, by Network-Manager or 
wpa_supplicant and that this is not the business of 
kernel-space.

Now I also have some experience with very light embedded devices 
(e.g. one with an AVR32 CPU has just 8 MB flash, yet it runs 
Linux!). For me the idea of putting Network manager there isn't 
appealing. However, wpa_supplicant is there anyway :-)

But I also claim that within mac80211 you have more information, 
in a "realtime" manner. If you want to relay all of this to 
user-land: okay, possible, via nl80211. But then your device 
will wakeup one or more user-space processes and consumes more 
power (one of my handheld devices can, with a 3200 mAh 
accumulator, survice for more than 8 hours with full WLAN 
connectivity!).

However, you can't do thing "against" the community, so if the 
word is "we do this in NM", then you'll have to do that. :-)  In 
this case be prepared to dive not only into mac80211, cfg80211 
and nl80211, but also into wpa_supplicant and/or nm (at least 
partially).


Some more thoughts: when one roams via wpa_supplicant / 
Network-Manager, it's usually quite easy to roam to very 
different networks, e.g. you can have two network entries "Home 
SCHURIG, WPA2" and "Company, MNSOLUTIONS, 802.11x with TTLS, 
CHAP and Radius".

However, in an environment where you have lots of identically 
configured APs (e.g. 30 APs on different channel, but all with 
the same ESSID and the same encryption scheme) it's usually 
beneficial to roam at a driver level.


4) Think about the future

There are 802.11 extensions for a fast handoff. Not sure if you 
want to implement anything of this, but at least consider them, 
so that adding support for them won't be harder than it should 
be :-)

Re: GSoC project proposals

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 7:42 AM, John W. Linville
<linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 03:36:00AM +0200, Mircea Gherzan wrote:
>
>> I'm a CS student (undergrad) wanting to do a wireless-related projec=
t
>> for the Google Summer of Code.
>>
>> As advised by Johannes Berg, I am posting on here in order to know t=
he
>> mentors and to get a better understanding of the requierements.
>>
>> From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming project.
>> Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it, so I cand get i=
n
>> touch with him/her?
>
> I think Luis Rodriguez penned the descriptions of those projects,
> so he might be the best person to ask about them. =C2=A0In any case,
> I would be happy to mentor such a project if you so desire.

This is what we have, through some brainstorming on IRC and a few
e-mails with a few people.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009#802.11_Wi=
reless

The application deadline was last Friday, March 13, 2009 so I suppose
that went in as-is. I volunteered a few people but if there are others
willing to help mentor some of these projects please just go right
ahead and add your name to the list or let me know and I'll add you.

So there are three GSoC project ideas listed there:

* Add AP support to Network Manager
* Improve wireless roaming
* Integrate GeoClue to help with regulatory compliance

The last one is the one which I hope to be able to mentor the most on
but will also obviously need some help from Dan. That one is also
being reviewed in conjunction with a similar project idea for GNOME
GSoC:

http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas

Seems GeoClue is welcomed for many reasons onto the desktop.

Whether or not these GSoC projects get picked up by Google I still
think its worth to put this out there and see if people are will pick
some of this work up.

OK so as for the question about roaming -- I'm up to help mentor it.
Anyone else?

  Luis
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Re: GSoC project proposals

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@gmail.com> =
wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 7:42 AM, John W. Linville
> <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 03:36:00AM +0200, Mircea Gherzan wrote:
>>
>>> I'm a CS student (undergrad) wanting to do a wireless-related proje=
ct
>>> for the Google Summer of Code.
>>>
>>> As advised by Johannes Berg, I am posting on here in order to know =
the
>>> mentors and to get a better understanding of the requierements.
>>>
>>> From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming project=
=2E
>>> Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it, so I cand get =
in
>>> touch with him/her?
>>
>> I think Luis Rodriguez penned the descriptions of those projects,
>> so he might be the best person to ask about them. =C2=A0In any case,
>> I would be happy to mentor such a project if you so desire.
>
> This is what we have, through some brainstorming on IRC and a few
> e-mails with a few people.
>
> https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009#802.11_=
Wireless
>
> The application deadline was last Friday, March 13, 2009 so I suppose
> that went in as-is. I volunteered a few people but if there are other=
s
> willing to help mentor some of these projects please just go right
> ahead and add your name to the list or let me know and I'll add you.
>
> So there are three GSoC project ideas listed there:
>
> * Add AP support to Network Manager
> * Improve wireless roaming
> * Integrate GeoClue to help with regulatory compliance
>
> The last one is the one which I hope to be able to mentor the most on
> but will also obviously need some help from Dan. That one is also
> being reviewed in conjunction with a similar project idea for GNOME
> GSoC:
>
> http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
>
> Seems GeoClue is welcomed for many reasons onto the desktop.
>
> Whether or not these GSoC projects get picked up by Google I still
> think its worth to put this out there and see if people are will pick
> some of this work up.
>
> OK so as for the question about roaming -- I'm up to help mentor it.
> Anyone else?

=46orgot to add Kroy, which seemed interested in the GeoClue stuff.

  Luis
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Re: GSoC project proposals

[Helmut Schaa]

Am Mittwoch, 18. M=E4rz 2009 schrieb Holger Schurig:
> > From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming
> > project. Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it,
> > so I cand get in touch with him/her?
>=20
> I wonder where the list has been published?

> Helmut Schaa once indicated that he has something in petto, but=20
> that was weeks ago. But maybe he still has ideas/hints about=20
> this.

Sadly I did not find time to work further on that topic :( but I did qu=
ite
some research and have some ideas and am still interrested.

Helmut
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Re: GSoC project proposals

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Mircea Gherzan <mgherzan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a CS student (undergrad) wanting to do a wireless-related project
> for the Google Summer of Code.
>
> As advised by Johannes Berg, I am posting on here in order to know the
> mentors and to get a better understanding of the requierements.
>
> From the publised list, I am most interested in the roaming project.
> Please, can anyone tell me who will be mentoring it, so I cand get in
> touch with him/her?

Just a heads up deadline is in two days.

 Luis