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Peer-to-Peer Cellular

Posted by michael on from the RIAA-already-alerted dept.

Phos writes: "A cool article over at the O'Reilly Network outlines a possible solution to cellular network outages in the event of an emergency. A P2P SMS technique where individual handsets act as autonomous SMS relays."

3 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. It already exists by ch-chuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    This article examines the task of creating a wireless communication system that can survive a catastrophic failure, and still provide basic communication services to its users.

    It's called Amateur or 'ham' radio - every year they have an event called 'field day' which is an exercise in taking your gear out and operating on generators, etc. 2 Meter handy talkies can work thru a repeater or direct simplex (peer-to-peer) if the repeater is down.

    I'll never forget listening to a ham during hurricane floyd, w/o power, operating on emergency backup power, 80 meter band, crouched in his garage on the NCarolina cost reporting the fierce winds in the night.

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  2. IETF MANET by bigpat · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is called a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (manet) and the IETF has a working group which has come up with some protocols and such.

    http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manet-charter. ht ml

  3. Ad-Hoc routing protocols by osolemirnix · · Score: 4, Informative

    Interested readers should probably read A Performance Comparison of Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols to find out why this is difficult.

    According to the article, phones would have to exchange and update their routing information all the time, even while everything was working normally (because by definition a phone can not know if a neighboring base station that's just out of reach is still working or not). Every phone would continuously keep broadcasting a list of every other phone and base station in it's reach.

    This overhead alone (just to update the routing tables) would consume a big chunk of the bandwith all the time. Since a base station dropout or overload is an exception (hopefully), a dynamic on-demand routing protocol would make much more sense in this case.

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    Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.