Meshdynamics
Intellectual Property and Embodiments

 Multi-radio Backhaul         Dynamic Auto-channel      High Speed mobility     Disruption-Tolerance

Robotics and Supervised Autonomy Focus

Meshdynamics' founder Francis previously started Advanced Cybernetics Group.  ACG was contracted by the US Air Force and NIST to work on Supervised Autonomy for remote robots (telerobotics). When it became apparent that last mile connectivity had its challenges, Meshdynamics was formed to develop robust last mile real-time connectivity solutions for semi-autonomous military machines.

In 2002, SPAWAR and USAF funded a multi-year NRE contract for us to develop a distributed, fault-tolerant device and protocol agnostic mesh control layer for use on edge military gear. Our solutions support real time, “Stealth Chirps” securely over logically contiguous cloud managed IP backbones.

Taking cues from Nature, we moved from mesh networks to ants (mobility) and now birds (Chirp protocols). 


Intellectual Property And Its Embodiments

             

Cloud Orchestration Model.                                                                Protocol Agnostic MeshControlTM and SDMTM

Our multi-radio wireless mesh routers connect as logical branches of a tree. As in Nature, a tree based routing is scalable, efficient and deterministic. Trees are inherently self healing.  The loss/corruption of a branch, does not cripple the entire network. Our mesh nodes manage branches of wireless network "trees", with added features to support mobility, diverse transceivers etc.

A distributed control system, running on each router, manages health of the network and clients. Nodes and enterprise "apps" running on the mesh nodes, communicate through periodic "heart beats". The heart beat framework also supports publish and subscribe mechanisms for real time sensor and control data streams. Exemplary source code for 80211.ac radios provided with customization support for licensee-specific radios, protocols and specialized use cases.   

The Chirp Platform is built as an overlay piggybacking intermittent Cloud-to-Edge connectivity. 

More Detailed Information

In 2002, mesh networks were 1 radio (simplex) and differed from our multi-radio approach (Above Right).
This performance analysis was published. Soon others were also selling two radio backhaul mesh nodes.

This mother patent refers to our novel tree-based mesh approach

            High Performance Wireless Networks Using Distributed Control . See also MDWMANOverview (2004)

The toll cost and hop cost taught in this patent was applied to Pico nets. It was submitted to the IEEE 802.15.4 group on Ad hoc Mesh networking (as single radio meshed systems.

            Managing Performance of  802.15.4 Ad hoc Mesh networks. See also Patent and  MDWPANOverview (2004) 

The Hybrid mesh (above, left) included both multi-radio backhauls and single radio meshed edge devices managed by a common mesh control layer (above right). This distributed control and mediation layer was radio and protocol agnostic - by design. It manages both topology and timing - it is application aware.

Chirp Packets: Transporting Terse messages over IP presented challenges since IP backbones prefer large packets and is best efforts based. We modeled "Quasi-TDMA"  Chirp flows with VOIP phones see:

            Managing Jitter and Latency in Wireless LANs Related: Real-Time-Mesh-Network

Mobility. Next, the Modular Mesh nodes needed mobility for our military and mining customers. See:

            Mobility Extensions for Wireless Multiple Radio Mesh and Military-Mesh-Networks

Disruption tolerance required fast switch over of routing topologies - supervised autonomy, See:

             Evolutionary Wireless Networks Fast Topology reforming, look ahead learning simulator.  Slides

Related: Patents and Tutorials (Videos). For more on Chirp, please visit Chirp Landing Page