PROWIND (Positioning Relay over Wirelessly Networked Devices) is an Android messaging, mapping, and tracking app that integrates location information in the creation of the mesh topology in an ad hoc wireless network.  The mesh infrastructure allows multi-hop communication among devices, a functionality usually lacking in ad hoc wireless networks due to the need for existing wireless access points and routers.

However, wireless mesh networking is still a growing research field, and very few stable implementations exist for mobile device platforms, such as the Android operating system. The nature of this project was exploratory in order to find a feasible wireless infrastructure that can be used to demonstrate the relay of location information among devices.

The application consists of three main modules: mesh network infrastructure, device location extractor, and user interface. The mesh network infrastructure serves as the framework that performs low-level network operations and provides an interface to the client. The framework was derived from ManetManager, an open source project  by ProjectSPAN, which is a fairly stable and suitable mesh network implementation for the Android platform. The device location extractor retrieves location information from the device's GPS chipset, which is passed to the mesh network infrastructure for integrating with the network topology. The user interface provides interaction with the application, such as viewing the list of connected peers, chat messaging, and node visualization and tracking on a map.

Future development from this proof-of-concept application can potentially expand the wireless infrastructure’s use  to serve as a communication medium for other data formats, such as voice, video, and other messaging specifications used by the Aerospace Corporation.