The Serval Project (often referred to as Serval) is a project financed by the

Shuttleworth Foundation The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...

, as well as various other organisations and accepting individual donations. It is headquartered at

Flinders University Flinders University is a public research university based in Adelaide, South Australia, with a footprint extending across 11 locations in South Australia and the Northern Territory. Founded in 1966, it was named in honour of British navigator M ...

in Adelaide, Australia. The project aims to develop technology that can be used to create direct connections between

cellular phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...

s through their

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves ...

interfaces, without the need of a mobile phone operator. The technology allows for live voice calls whenever the mesh is able to find a route between the participants. Text messages and other data can be communicated using a

store and forward Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in ...

system called Rhizome, allowing communication over unlimited distances and without a stable live mesh connection between all participants. The Serval Project includes a collaborate mapping application intended to support disaster relief and recovery efforts. A "mesh extender" is being developed, which establishes a short range Serval mesh over WiFi and joins it with other more distant meshes by linking to other mesh extenders over

packet radio In digital radio, packet radio is the application of packet switching techniques to digital radio communications. Packet radio uses a packet switching protocol as opposed to circuit switching or message switching protocols to transmit digital ...

operating in the ISM 915 MHz band.

Serval Mesh

Serval Mesh is an Android application and the Serval Project's flagship product. It is currently distributed through various application distribution platforms and repositories and can also be downloaded directly from the project's website. The application may be shared directly from one device to others nearby over WiFi or

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

. The Serval Mesh application is built out of two components: a user interface called Batphone, and a core networking, encryption, and file sharing component called Serval DNA. The Batphone source code is licensed to the public under the terms of the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

license, whereas the Serval DNA source code is licensed under the terms of the GPLv2 license.

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* Politics and technology Internet-related activism Proposed telecommunications infrastructure Mesh networking {{telecommunications-stub

Serval Mesh

See also

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External links