The Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) is a

grassroots A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or economic movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at t ...

wireless community network established in 2002 in

Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...

. By August 2010, the network had grown to include 1,120 backbone nodes, with over 2,900 client computers actively linked to it. There is also an association-club that supports the network's objectives.

Cultural and geographical context

Although the network began in

, the capital of

, its activities are no longer limited to the city. It covers a geographical area 110 km from North to South and 85 km from West to East, with the most southern point being Palaia Epidavros (

Epidaurus Epidaurus ( gr, Ἐπίδαυρος) was a small city (''polis'') in ancient Greece, on the Argolid Peninsula at the Saronic Gulf. Two modern towns bear the name Epidavros: ''Palaia Epidavros'' and ''Nea Epidavros''. Since 2010 they belong to the ...

) and the most northern point being the town of Nea Artaki on the island of

Euboea Evia (, ; el, Εύβοια ; grc, Εὔβοια ) or Euboia (, ) is the second-largest Greek island in area and population, after Crete. It is separated from Boeotia in mainland Greece by the narrow Euripus Strait (only at its narrowest poin ...

. The wide expansion of the network allows isolated areas with poor technological and broadband infrastructure to connect with the Athenian network. The islands of

Aegina Aegina (; el, Αίγινα, ''Aígina'' ; grc, Αἴγῑνα) is one of the Saronic Islands of Greece in the Saronic Gulf, from Athens. Tradition derives the name from Aegina (mythology), Aegina, the mother of the hero Aeacus, who was born ...

, Salamina and the regions surrounding Athens are also connected to the network. Recently the island of Euboea connected with more links with AWMN for redundancy purposes and the next stage will be to join the wireless 'islets' located in

Corinth Corinth ( ; el, Κόρινθος, Kórinthos, ) is the successor to an ancient city, and is a former municipality in Corinthia, Peloponnese, which is located in south-central Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform, it has been part o ...

Lamia (city) Lamia ( el, Λαμία, ''Lamía'', ) is a city in central Greece. The city dates back to antiquity, and is today the capital of the regional unit of Phthiotis and of the Central Greece region (comprising five regional units). According to the 20 ...

and Volos. There are also plans to reach even more remote cities of Greece such as

Patras ) , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , demographics1_title2 = , demographics1_info2 = , timezone1 = EET , utc_offset1 = +2 , ...

. This year AWMN connected most of the Greek communities and managed to cross the Greek borders. It has initiated a VPN connection with '' wlan slovenija'' network in

Slovenia Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, an ...

with the vision to connect all the wireless communities of Europe into one network.

Project history

AWMN was formed as a community back in 2002. Due to tremendous problems with broadband services in Greece in 2002 the number of such services available to home users was extremely limited. AWMN was founded as an alternative

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

network, which allowed its users to experience real broadband services. However, an increasing number of people started to have an interest in the network. The number of network nodes started to grow exponentially, and the network's character changed from an alternative telecom network to a social network of people based on their interest in the IT/Telecom sector. The objectives of the project include the following: * Creating, developing and maintaining a Wireless Community Network which will provide broadband services to its members. * Developing technologies based on wireless and digital telecommunications. * Educate the public on the use of wireless and digital communications * Promote and encourage volunteerism and active participation. The association, as of August 2010, has around 67 members. Not all members of the backbone network are members of the association, and there are around 900 that do not want to participate in the association, due to the extent of moderation and speech censorship that is practiced in the association's forum, wiki and assembly. Participation in the association has, throughout its history, always been on a voluntary basis. No one is obliged to sign a peering agreement as long as it is not needed, and no one has to join the association to participate to the network, rendering the AWMN network one of the most open networks in the world. However all 1080 backbone node owners are obliged to accept responsibility for the smooth running of their node, follow the basic rules of the community and follow basic network neutrality rules.

The community

Users are categorised as backbone nodes and AP client nodes. The backbone nodes are nodes routing data that have no origin and destination themselves. The network is a mosaic of people from varying ages and educational backgrounds including IT and telecommunications professionals, radio amateurs, IT students and technology enthusiasts. All are driven by a strong community spirit and contribute on a voluntary basis.

Technology

AWMN makes extensive use of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

802.11 set of standards and operates on the 2.4 GHz (mainly for the Open APs) and 5.4 GHz (for the backbone links) license-free ISM frequency bands. Over the last few years, AWMN has tested (and later used in production environments) equipment from a huge variety of vendors. The routing protocol used by the network is

BGP Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous system (Internet), autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector ...

. Efforts have been made to move towards new, more adaptive, experimental protocols such as OLSR and

B.A.T.M.A.N. The Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) is a routing protocol for Multi-hop routing, multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks which is under development by the German "Freifunk" community and intended to replace the Optimized Link ...

Some members of the AWMN community have contributed feedback and code to many

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

routing projects. Homemade equipment is encouraged. Many

workshops Beginning with the Industrial Revolution era, a workshop may be a room, rooms or building which provides both the area and tools (or machinery) that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods. Workshops were the only ...

have been held so that members can become familiar with constructing their own aerials and cables. Additionally, the community regularly organizes seminars to educate aspiring network administrators on wireless technologies, protocols,

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone netw ...

and

, in the conditions of an operational large-scale network. A wide variety of software is used in the network but AWMN services rely heavily on

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

(or other free

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

variants).

Services

The network currently provides a full-featured internal

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

network, High Definition streaming services,

game servers A game server (also sometimes referred to as a host) is a server which is the authoritative source of events in a multiplayer video game. The server transmits enough data about its internal state to allow its connected clients to maintain their ...

, file sharing services, hundreds of users/nodes webpages, network statistics services,

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

weather station A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for measuring atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasts and to study the weather and climate. The measurements taken include tempera ...

s and VPN servers. WiND is a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

for

wireless community networks Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

, such as AWMN itself, which has been created by members of AWMN. WiND provides a front-end interface to a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

where information of the

nodes In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a Vertex (graph theory), vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics *Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two ...

can be stored, such as position details,

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

, IP addressing and a list of provided

network service In computer networking, a network service is an application running at the network application layer and above, that provides data storage, manipulation, presentation, communication or other capability which is often implemented using a client� ...

External links

The association site

YouTube Video Presentation

References

{{reflist Wireless community networks Organizations based in Attica Athens society