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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."

4 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. They just had to do it... by Uttles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The author just had to take a shot at Napster:

    Gnutella is a completely decentralized, or peer-to-peer, file-sharing system. Unlike Napster, there is no centralized server that acts as a broker in processing search requests, matching users with each other. Gnutella clients automatically seek out other Gnutella clients elsewhere on the Internet.
    (I guess gnutella is free from lawsuit then?)

    I'm not so sure I like the idea: what if some cell phone junkie figures out a way to display all of the messages coming into his phone (a friend of mine can do similar things) and he gets to read everyone's text messages... not a good thought.

    --

    ~ now you know
  2. this is a nice idea but... by toast0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In order for peer to peer mode to work, you have to have some idea who to send messages you want to get to a certain phone. Which means your phone needs a routing table, and possibly a very large one. Not to mention that all the possible routes need to be sent to every phone. Also, if you send your message to somebody's cell phone, who then leaves the network (power off, phone drops in water, etc) for a long period of time, the message disappears, this possibility might encourage people to just keep trying for a voice connection for messages they need delivered.

    --
    Need a Catering Connection
  3. Re:Battery Life by bn557 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, if this was a service that was turned on only in emergencies, you wouldn't have that problem. HOPEFULLY, whatever was causing the cell phones not to work, would be resolved in less than a couple of days. This is just being looked at so that, in event of the apocolypse arriving, you can call your friends in another time zone and give them fair warning.

    --
    Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
  4. Disadvantages by sting3r · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's sad to see that the author didn't touch on any of the possible downsides to his approach:

    • It's expensive. Redesigning SMS, asking the FCC for more spectrum, and fine-tuning the new protocol isn't cheap. And the wireless providers (many of whom have never run in the black) don't have much of an incentive to support anything PTP. Especially because catastrophic network failures are very rare.
    • Cheating. Most providers charge for SMS. How do they know that people won't try to beat the system and get SMS services for free?
    • Security. Unless somebody develops public key infrastructure for mobile phones, messages will be vulnerable to interception and malicious alteration. And that's probably the last thing emergency workers need to deal with.
    • Battery life. Ordinarily, PCS phones are only transmitting and receiving every 2-5 seconds, and they are communicating with a relatively powerful base station. This sort of thing would kill battery life. Unless all of the phone makers start using fuel cells, this is a grave concern.

    -sting3r