CUWiN and the Mesa Grande Reservation Network
On June 23, 2006, members of Team CUWiN met up with our partners at Tribal Digital Village in southern California to install a mesh wireless network on the Mesa Grande Reservation. Residents in Mesa Grande are so isolated that while they do receive plain old telephone service and satellite television, they do not receive postal service, cellular phone coverage, or broadband Internet. This satellite map gives a good feel for the remoteness of the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation.
To solve this problem, TDV has created an impressive point-to-point wireless network for providing a single point of broadband access at the reservation's tribal hall. The CUWiN network utilizes this single point of access to spread connectivity to every home on the reservation. After a one-week setup and subsequent follow-up work by TDV's team on the ground in San Diego and CUWiN's developers in central Illinois, the network went live, delivering, for the first time ever, broadband services to reservation residents.
The Mesa Grande Reservation network was a catalyst for rapid development of the CUWiN software and an innovative hands-on project for TDV's network engineers. Along with the complex logistics of organizing the rapid-deployment of the hardware in an extremely remote location, TDV's staff had to become familiar with an entirely new (open) networking platform.
Several key upgrades and features were also added to CUWiN's software over the course of the project. For example, DHCPselect, which determines whether a node is a gateway to the Internet, has been revamped to prevent the creation of "black holes" in the network. Black holes were created when nodes switched to gateway mode when plugged into the wrong ports on the Linksys routers in resident's homes. These black holes wrecked network traffic since, to the network, the Linksys routers pretended to be connected to the Internet when they were not. In addition, CUWiN's developers greatly lessened the amount of logging that our routing deamon (hslsd) natively does. The logging, which is very useful for debugging, was creating an artificial limit on the amount of traffic a node could handle. Finally, the Mesa Grande Reservation network has reinforced the need for multiple gateway support, which is now planned beginning with the public release of version 0.8.0 of the CUWiN software.
The CUWiN and TDV teams have overcome numerous obstacles (not the least of which was the 127 degree temperature on one of the installation days) and, though our collaboration, are able to successfully bring broadband connectivity to a systematically underserved community. By combining the experience and dedication of TDV's staff with the R&D skills from Team CUWiN, this partnership prototyped new low-cost wireless technologies and fostered digital expansion to the high desert of Southern California.
Below are a few images taken during the Mesa Grande installation:
