Section: Application Domains

Community Networks

Abstract. There is an increasing demand to deploy network within a community, rural or urban, with cabled or wireless access.

Community networks or citizen network are now frequent in big cities. In America most of the main cities have a community network. A community network is using the communication resource of each member (ADSL, Cable and wireless) to provide a general coverage of a city. Pedestrian in the street or in city mails can communicate via a high speed mobile mesh network. This new trend now appears in Europe with many experiments of the OLSR routing protocol in Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Berlin, Bruxelles, Seattle. The management of such networks is completely distributed and makes them very robust to faults. There is room for smart operators in this business.