[olpc-software] Servers

[Ivan Krstic]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> Most commodity access points don't work well with large numbers of
> clients; their design center is a house with a few users. Identifying
> pretty cheap, access points that don't have this problem would be good
> to do.

Right. On the OLPC scale, though, management and logistics cost of the
access points become serious factors to consider.

> The laptops, even used as an access point, will function much better
> than the typical cheap access points you buy in a store.

And there are various approaches to take here. One laptop won't be able
to serve as an AP to a thousand others if we enact the standard,
fully-centralized AP model. But there's a lot of research[0] that deals
with data querying and routing in mesh networks; we could likely turn
some of it inside out to provide a laptop AP mode that scales to large
numbers of clients. We can't match the level of service provided by
high-powered dedicated AP hardware, but we can make things work.



[0] e.g. Zhao, Liu, Lui, Guibas and Reich (2003) or Chu, Haussecker,
Zhao (2002)

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D