PaulVMo
commented
2 years ago Thanks for your application. I am curious how the capabilities described in milestones 1 and 2 complement or augment what is already available on mappers.helium.com. Several of the items you mention like distance, redundancy, and signal strength are already there. Some functionality that could potentially be added there is the ability to look at coverage by a single hotspot like you describe.
Also regarding building a reputation score or otherwise proving hotspot location with mapping, you will need to solve the challenge of being able to trust the mapping hardware itself. There have been a few discussions of ways to do this with "golden" hardware, anchor gateways, and the such (can share Discord links for more info).
Something that might be able to be done without fully trusted mappers is contributing to contribute to a denylist if something like that were to be taken up by the community and validators.
pilotdeveloper
cvolkernick
JessmFromEarth
Project:
Coverage Mapping API, Signal Quality Reports and Hotspot Coverage (HotspotRange.com)
Edit: 9/26/21 - This project is being modified to expand much further on the secure mapping pieces. Some of the fiat ask may change through this but this change is in response to the most recent developments with the PoC forwarding.
Elevator Pitch:
If we want Helium to grow, we need to prove that coverage exists at a given location and that it will actually allow LoRa devices to access the network. This project can lay the foundation for ensuring people aren't gaming the network by calculating locations of hotspots and providing confidence scores. This specific project has multiple use cases which will be described below.
Total fiat/hnt ask:
$80,000 (in stages described below).
Name and Address: Provided via email previously.
Company Name: Dinsky Doodles LLC
Please provide your legal name and a link to the submitted issue to grants@dewi.org. This will streamline the contract process and KYC. A lack of this information will delay the contract.
Team or Project website: (optional)
http://hotspotrange.com (not currently deployed)
Proof Of Concept:
https://ajkelly.net/portfolio/static/getHotspotData.php
Pervious projects I've completed with similar concepts: Leafly v1.0 Android Application Tools under NDA for Fortune 500s
Team or projects social: (optional) Team: to be hired
Code Repos of team or key applicants:
Myself - a senior software engineering manager who's working on his Master's of Computer science in his free time.
Project Details: This project will have numerous facets that will be delivered in the order below:
1) (Completed and as part of the PoC above) An ingestion API that pulls in mapping data from mappers (or console once the project is approved) that transforms the data to calculate the following:
1b) As part of the accuracy of hotspot placement, this will be aggregated into two specific parts: the reported data from the mappers, and the reported data from the beacons. In the prototype, I'm already calculating the accuracy of the hotspot's location; by using multiple data points and averaging the perceived distance in the direction of the signal. (Direction is hotspot location to mapper location). I'm also strengthening this number by including diversity of the device reporting the data. What I'm seeing is a correlation - X distance away will have Y impact on the signals and this can be used to determine the accuracy of the placement. What's critical to note is that v1 will use generalized building data for a given city instead of precise. V2 can potentially include city topography too.
2) (In Progress - largest development cost) A public facing UI that allows users to view their hotspot and any coverage data that we have. This UI features a signal quality report (so that hotspot owners can diagnose blockers such as buildings or terrain) and a redundancy factor to help encourage people to spread the network. The data will be presented on a layered map in the form of a red/green heatmap. Each metric will allow for drilling down so that a user can see things like redundancy, signal quality, reliability, and competition factor.
2b) (In Progress) - A mapping API to support all of the above in addition to other metrics including: City Coverage, State / Province Coverage, Coverage Latency, Coverage Redundancy, Coverage Competition.
3) (Not Started - data is available) An API that provides a report of "most reputable" and "least reputable" asserted hotspots. This will be based on calculations on data from the mappers, the diversity factor of the mapper (different organizations), and PoC v12 metrics.
4) (Not started - scoped) A payment system for validating hotspot placement. Rewarding Mappers with HNT by paying to validate the locations of the hotspots - at a bare minimum, covering the data credits cost, and at a maximum, start paying out actual PoC rewards.
5) (head is in the cloud now) Have a ML model to automatically identify coverage patterns scores which would indicate stacking or misassertion. This is the least baked and thought out part of the project; however, in the coverage mapping above, this would allow us to focus on bad actors and consider taking punitive action (pending approval from community).
Roadmap:
All items can be broken down in to further Epics, Features, or User Stories if needed for the consideration of this grant.
All grant funds quoted above will be used for the following purposes:
To help save on costs, I'll take point as the PM (as I have experience as a PM) but may add additional help in this area.
Given that this has an ETL model and potentially large amounts of data, it's important that I call out that the long term operational costs may be a problem. To proactively plan for this (and in spirit of transparency), we may need to add a limited but monetized experience where X calls would always be free for life - Y amount would be at a premium service. This will not be able to be determined until after project launch.
Additional considerations:
We would need to use a significantly faster mapper code such as the one I've published here: https://github.com/pilotdeveloper/cubecell_gps_mapping
Additional Usages: