Streaming via Mesh Networks

This article describes a test in which a video image was streamed from a wireless IP camera mounted on a police patrol boat to 30 people stationed on and around the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of relying on physical access points, which would be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming to install, the Golden Gate users had devices with off-the-shelf 802.11b WLAN cards and an early version of wireless mesh software from PacketHop. The PacketHop software creates a peer-to-peer mesh network, where each wireless client becomes a routing node that's aware of all its neighbors and can pass data and images among them. The range depends on what kind of 802.11 radio the client has, radio power levels and antenna design. In the Golden Gate test, the WLAN radios in the NICs ran at the highest power level allowed, 200 milliwatts. According to PacketHop, the 11b client radios meshed with each other at ranges of 1,500-2,500 feet.