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

20240318 Cuyamaca Peak (stereo view at 30fps)

This is a time lapse view from Cuyamaca Peak on 18 March 2024 between 9:00 and 15:00, with images collected in 10 second intervals. It shows a 360 degree stereo view, with one channel in monochrome (left eye) and the other in color (right eye), but also converted to monochrome, due to the two imager chips we have in our fixed-view cameras. Hence this is best viewed on high resolution Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality equipment, alongside picking a high resolution in the YouTube settings. The playback speed of these once-per-10seconds images is set to 30 fps, but you should be able to slow it down more in the YouTube settings to see details longer.

The reason this time period was interesting because during that interval significant clouds moved in from the north and went southwards.

Due to only having an imager separation comparable to the human eye distance, the 3D effects would be mostly visible in the foreground.

At 6,515 feet, Cuyamaca Peak is the second highest mountain in San Diego County, only to be exceeded by 11 feet by Hot Springs Peak.