The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), a University of California San Diego partnership project led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, supports Internet-data applications in the research, education, and public safety realms.


HPWREN functions as a collaborative, Internet-connected cyberinfrastructure. The project supports a high-bandwidth wireless backbone and access data network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties in areas that are typically not well-served by other technologies to reach the Internet. This includes backbone locations, typically sited on mountain tops, to connect often hard-to-reach areas in the remote Southern California back country.

Recent Image

Evening image of 10 February on Boucher Hill, looking north.

The History of HPWREN: A Retrospective from 2023

last update: 26 February 2024

This overview describes the evolution of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) Project. HPWREN originated as a wide-area wireless communications research project at the dawn of this millennium. Initially limited to San Diego County in support of Internet data applications in the research and education domains, it evolved over time. A substantial collaboration with first responder agencies emerged from at first very informal discussions, when those agencies assisted with HPWREN's need to deploy routers and wireless links on mountain tops.

HPWREN Time Lapse or

Live Stream Videos

Fires, weather conditions, flooding, and other public safety conditions are scenarios where real-time sensor data distributions can become important aspects for situational awareness. HPWREN can now provide live feeds from most of its cameras, in addition to the post-processed videos shown at:

https://www.youtube.com/user/hpwren/videos



Recent video

20231224 Falcon-9 launch aerial art arch

This time-lapse set shows some of the aerial art that a Falcon-9 rocket painted the sky with during its launch arch, at times making it look like an early Christmas Star on the 24th of December. The images were taken by automated HPWREN 360 degree camera sets that are located on top of mountains. Their primary objective is to look for fire ignitions and to monitor fire progression.

The set consists of four pieces:

1. Launch as seen from the west-pointing camera at the Mt. Wilson Observatory

2. Same as (1.), except that some frames stay on longer to make the video slow down

3. This is a synchronized compilation of images from four cameras: Cuyamaca Peak west and south pointing, as well as the west and south pointing cameras on Toro Peak. This segment shows the whole arch across the camera pairs

4. A while later, part of the tail was still illuminated while moving east from above the Mt. Wilson Observatory

Items 1 to 3 only use the monochrome chips, since they are more light sensitive. With the exception of the last clip, the images were expected to arrive in 10-second intervals. The video was uploaded at a 6144x4096 pixel resolution and is encoded at 4 fps.

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