AllNet Project

User FAQ

Summary

The AllNet project aims to allow personal devices to communicate directly with each other. You may see a demo of this on this youtube video.

The benefits of AllNet include:

• A backup communication system during emergencies and at other times when off the grid
• A secure way of exchanging interpersonal messages and for communication among small groups
• A simple way of sharing a small portion of available resources to build better communities (somewhat similar to the openwireless.org movement)

The AllNet project was started by Edo Biagioni, who can be contacted here.

Currently the main user-facing application in AllNet is called xchat or allnet-xchat.

Code

• The latest version of the code is available on sourceforge and on github. Github also has the source code for iOS and Android.

  To get started, run the following (the dot at the end is required).

  git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/allnet/code .

  and follow the instructions in the README file.
• Release of Version 3.3.2 for Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, and ARM (.tar, 2022/10/01). The main improvement is the support for large messages, which should eventually allow sending and receiving images and videos.
  Binaries are available for Linux x86 64-bit and 32-bit, for MacOS x86 64-bit Mac, for Windows 64, and ARM 32.

  For Windows, you must have cygwin1.dll in your path. The way I did it is to run set PATH=%PATH%;C:\cygwin64\bin in the CMD window. This should work if you have cygwin installed. It is probably a bad idea to download a random cygwin1.dll from the web -- I suggest you get your cygwin from https://www.cygwin.com/).

  Additional source files are needed to compile for iOS devices using XCode (you probably need to adjust header search paths in XCode, and may need other minor tweaks).

  It may be helpful to read the documentation.

• Previous versions may be found here.

  I welcome feedback.

Publications

• Edoardo Biagioni. ``Secure Anonymous Acknowledgements in a Delay-Tolerant Network'', at the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2023), February 2023, Honolulu, Hawaii.
  The related presentation.
• Edoardo Biagioni. ``Preventing UDP Flooding Amplification Attacks with Weak Authentication'', at the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2019), February 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii.
  The related presentation.
• ``A Network Testbed for Ad-Hoc Communications using Raspberry Pi and 802.11'', at the 52nd HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences), in January 2019.
  The related presentation.
• An ignite (20 slides, 15 seconds each) talk at HICSS 2018, and the video of the talk.
• ``A Diagnostic Tool for Ad-Hoc and Delay-Tolerant Networks'', accepted by the conference on Local Computer Networks (Singapore, October 2017). Also presented as a poster.
• A talk at the CIS Seminar at UH, on September 18th, 2017.
• ``Mobility and Address Freedom in AllNet''.
  Ninth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2017), July 4-7, 2017, Milan, Italy. The preprint is also available as http://hdl.handle.net/10125/34243.
  The related presentation.
• Distributed Anonymous Computation of Social Distance, preprint of a short paper in CCNC 2016, The 13th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference, 9-12 January 2016, Las Vegas. Also available as http://hdl.handle.net/10125/39968.
  The related presentation.
• Ubiquitous Interpersonal Communication over Ad-Hoc Networks and the Internet, at the 47th HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences), in January 2014.
  The related presentation.
• A white paper (also available as http://hdl.handle.net/10125/34244) describing in some detail the design and initial implementation of Version 2 of AllNet.
• A white paper (also available as http://hdl.handle.net/10125/34245) describing how to use social networking distance to prioritize packets.
• A paper describing the technical ideas and some of the philosophy of AllNet. "A Ubiquitous, Infrastructure-Free Network for Interpersonal Communications", Edoardo Biagioni, presented at the fourth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2012), July 4-6, 2012, Phuket, Thailand.
  The related presentation is here
• A paper on motivations for sharing network resources. "Sharing Networking Resources to Create a Pervasive Infrastructure", Caterina Desiato and Edoardo Biagioni, 2012. A proposal based on this paper was presented at the Ninth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society, 13-14 January 2013, Vancouver, Canada
• The project summary (2011-12-27)
• The original proposal (2011-12-27) and updated proposal (2012-12-15).

Miscellaneous

The privacy policy for AllNet and for this website.