Extreme networking

This is not a single project, but rather a larger cluster of potential projects in the field of what could be summarized as extreme networking.

The networks we are interested in are typically wireless, and can be extreme in different senses of the word:

• distance - hundreds of kilometers terrestrial, 10,000s of km to satellite
• latency - sub-ms latencies
• autonomy - off-grid quality - extreme remote conditions
• power - ultra-low power communications
• cost - extreme low budget networking

Use cases motivating this pushing of boundaries range from satellite communications to wildlife conservation in remote regions, disaster prediction and warning systems to maritime networking. The use cases are often characterized by a near-complete absence of network and energy infrastructure.

Networks are often from the LoRa family of standards, but including extensions of it, e.g. LR-FHSS, FLRC.

LoRa is a long range, low bandwith networking protocol widely used in Internet of Things projects, sensor networks, low power, low cost and embedded systems. LoRa’s encoding schema allows for extremely long distance communications with small power usage and small simple antennas. This combination of features has made it attractive to small satellite operators flying cubesats and LoRa is now routinely used to connect small ground based nodes to satellites, typically for remote sensor network deployments, and for satellite telemetry, e.g. by the Starlink constellation and in the TinyGS project.

If this spectrum of potential projects is interesting to you, or you have concrete ideas that fit in, please contact us!