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In 2017 Hurricane Maria, a category-5 hurricane, brought unprecedented death and destruction to Puerto Rico. This followed just days after similarly catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean, and then a year later Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas. In a 12 month window, these four Atlantic hurricanes combined to inflict an estimated 3000+ fatalities and $318 billion in economic damage.

Maria destroyed everything including our infrastructure for electricity and communications. Communications is a cornerstone of disaster response and without it, we have no means to reach out to loved ones, friends, or first responders. Without modern networks, our ability to organize and coordinate an effective response is dramatically impaired.

The ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) was created by OWL Integrations to solve this problem. When infrastructure is down, the CDP can help restore that 1% of critical communication that people need to find loved ones and first responders.

Applications of the CDP have grown beyond Hurricane response to adapt for other natural disasters (such as earthquakes, wildfires), cellular congestion (large events, festivals, sports), sensor networks (farmland, offshore industrials), and more. Working with the Linux Foundation, OWL Integrations open-sourced the CDP in March 2020 to supercharge development and more rapidly put this in the hands of the people and communities who need it most.

What is the ClusterDuck Protocol?

The ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) is a radio protocol for Internet-of-Things devices to communicate with each other using LoRa (Long Range radio), Bluetooth, and/or WiFi. This customizable firmware gives us the ability to set up communications and sensor networks in areas where connectivity may be fragile, hard to work with, or nonexistent.

How does the ClusterDuck Protocol work?

A Duck is an ad-hoc mesh network node that connect to other Ducks (and eventually a gateway to Internet) to create a network cluster that we call the ClusterDuck Network (CDN). This network provides a foundation for communications and sensors in infrastructure-deprived environments. Ducks with integrated sensors can leverage the CDP to autonomously collect data about their environment to provide situational awareness.

One of the first use cases was for disaster relief. Civilians, first responders, and others may connect to Ducks over WiFi or Bluetooth with their smartphone or computer to submit critical information to the network.

Resources

• I want to make my first Duck! Getting Started
• I want to join the community to learn more! Weekly town hall is every Monday at 2pm ET in Discord
• There are types of Ducks? What is the difference between each? The Duck Family
• I am fairly experienced, and I want to understand CDP data structures. Message Handling
• Having trouble? Reach out to us directly in Discord. The community is here all day, every day. Join us in Discord

Interested in developing the CDP with us? Read this wiki, fork the repo, submit an issue, or just say "Hello!" in the ClusterDuck Protocol Discord!