A decentralized networking technology originally built for battlefields and Burning Man is today being reimagined from the ground up.

Mesh networks-named for their fishnet-like connections-emerged over the past few decades from rigorous, mathematical research on keeping data flowing even when portions of a system fail. But the theory hasn’t always matched up to reality.Real-world mesh networks have proved vulnerable to shutdowns in some of the very settings such as certain kinds of large crowds, they’re supposed to be good at handling.

So researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard and the City Collage of New York have recently built a prototype mesh networking system that’s been hardened for some of the most challenging and adversarial environments around: political protests.

In a paper presented last week at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Taipei the researchers announced a prototype mesh network called Friend. Amigo, for starters, has been designed to work in environments where the Internet has been shut off, as seen during unrest in India, Iraq, and Syria among other countries.

“Shutting down the internet during times of great civil protest is a way to prevent people from being able to organise and come together,” says Tushar Jois, assistant professor of electrical engineering at City College. “That is what we’re specifically tailoring our technology for.”

Amigo proposes at least three ways to bolster the more conventional approaches to mesh networks.Recent scholarship on mesh outages in protest scenarios reveals problems such as network messages failing to deliver, appearing out of order, and exposing users to being traced-even if the nodes in the network (e.g. phones running the mesh app) are right next to each other. The researchers found that prying beneath the mesh network’s high-level, encrypted communications and down into nuts-and-bolts Wi-Fi operations revealed opportunities that previous mesh networks had failed to seize on.

Amigo: A Mesh Network Designed for Crowds

Imagine a protest where cell service is jammed. Now picture a network that thrives because of the crowd, not in spite of it. That’s the idea behind Amigo, a new mesh network designed to function reliably even in densely packed environments. Traditional mesh networks struggle when many devices converge in a small area,but Amigo is different.

Diogo Baradas, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, points out Amigo’s potential extends beyond political demonstrations. “Another scenario where such crowd dynamics are of particular interest includes natural disaster scenarios-like flooding, fires, and earthquakes-where Internet communications may become unavailable,” he says. “Affected citizens, first-responders, and volunteers must coordinate to ensure a fitting response.”

Developers have built the Amigo mesh network around mathematical models of crowds that are based on studies of real-world crowds.
Cora Ruiz

Today’s Mesh Networks Know Nothing About Crowds

Current mesh networks frequently enough fail to account for how people actually move and cluster. Cora Ruiz,a graduate student at City College,is researching how to better model crowds for mesh networking. She explains that existing systems typically use a “random walk” approach,which doesn’t reflect real-world behavior.

Amigo, though, uses a more elegant model. It’s built on mathematical representations of crowd behavior derived from observing actual crowds. this allows the network to predict how devices will move and adjust accordingly,maintaining connectivity even as people shift and gather. The team’s simulations show Amigo substantially outperforms standard mesh protocols in crowded conditions.

The key is understanding that people aren’t random. They tend to follow paths,congregate in groups,and respond to events as a collective. Amigo incorporates these patterns, creating a more robust and reliable network for situations where connectivity matters most.