How Do I Do That?

Project Byzantium is a project set up to give us communication lines during natural disasters, zombie apocolypses, severed communication lines etc. It is named after the Byzantium fault tolerance engineering mechanism, that is a mechanism that allows for systems to function even after some parts have failed.

The developers of the project aim to have a network that will work even when some of the nodes go offline in power outage situations or zombies over run the area the node is and destroy it or any other cause for a machine to drop out of the network.

How do they Do That?

This is being done, not with the invention of new technologies, but with the use of existing ones in a new way. The network will effectively be an ad-hoc wirerless mesh network. This will not rely on routers or access points to get information around the network which means that there is not one node that is crucial to the running of the network.

How Can I Get Involved?

Simple, there is a live image that can be put onto a CD or USB stick and run off that, all you would need is a power source, a computer with specs like you would expect in a computer from post 2005 and a wireless card. The node can be controlled using a web-based control panel that can be used to configure the services of the machine. You can save configurations to removable media and this can be made accessible from the control panel.

So now you can keep on communicating even when a horde of mindless zombies are knocking at the door.