A fascinating idea, I wish you a lot of luck in this endeavor!<p>If I were going to go this route, that is, to engineer a network not dependent on the Internet -- I'd first go down to the most fundamental principle of WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, EDGE, EVDO, LTE, etc. -- and that most fundamental principal is <i>RADIO</i>.<p>From there, I'd ask the question -- how can any device which implements one or more of the wireless protocols that we all know and love: (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wireless_data_standards" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wireless_data_st...</a>) be converted back to raw radio?<p>If it can be done, use that and design upwards.<p>If it can't be done, then use the lowest abstraction level (above raw radio) possible that can be used for the device in question...<p>That's the comm side of things.<p>The "next job up" is to figure out the logistics of user adoption, getting these radio devices to communicate, what bitrates to use, what access patterns to use, how do you get data over longer stretches (if there's no user/node to hop off), etc., etc.<p>But, quite the technical challenge!<p>Of course, you can "cheat" -- and use pre-made protocols/software/drivers -- which gets you the highest amount of abstraction (but the least amount of control).<p>SDR -- Software Defined Radio -- would seem to be a good middle ground between these two areas of abstraction...<p>I'd almost argue that if someone were to make the simplest of all SDR's that could turn ordinary WiFi cards and devices into SDR, and couple that with a store-and-forward network like FidoNet or Bitnet (if anyone remembers those!), then they'd be in business!<p>Anyway, it's a very interesting and challenging project!<p>I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor!