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Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones?
Mike writes "This Wired article mentions that research firm SRI International has come up with a nifty way to lessen the need for the ugly cell towers that you see popping up everywhere (I love the ones here in Atlanta that are oh-so-cleverly dressed up to look like pine trees). Their PacketHop software would create a sort of peer-to-peer network, utilizing the unused power in phones in the vicinity as miniature relays, with your voice/data hopping from one phone to the next until it reaches a relay tower and its final destination."
but if you used cingular, could your hop conduct through att wireless phones, or even better, would one of the companies program them to use up their competitors' phones first?
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A system like that's gotta be able to reconfigure itself instantly, at "packet speed;" say I'm carrying some guy's packets and I drive into a tunnel... sorta like Gnutella on crack. Good stuff.
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How would this reduce the amount of traffic going through towers? The only traffic that wouldn't go through the tower is traffic that has enough turned-on phones running that software between you and the person you're calling. All other connections would hop through a few phones and go through the tower anyway. At best, local calls wouldn't need to go through towers. This would vary based on the density of cell phone users in your area compared to the density of towers. At worst, one's range or reception from a distant tower could be improved. Of course, there are also the security and power issues mentioned by others to take into consideration. Neat idea, though. Maybe if everyone had a cell-phone with a great battery and an impressive range, towers for local calls, at least, could be eliminated and used just for outgoing calls. So the cell phone network would be one of separate P2P networks connected by towers. That is, until the population is dense enough to send a call from New York to California.
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I had a similar idea but using particle entanglement as the transmission medium. I know the technology isn't there(and may never be) but bear with me a moment. Let's say you manufacture phones that have one million halves of entangled particles, preferably entangled molecules. If every eight particles is entangled with 8 particles on a different phone you can have 131,000 separate connections. Each of those phones would also have 131,000 unique connections. It doesn't take much to make a peer to peer phone network with such a setup.
The problem is that if such a communication device becomes feasible, will the manufacturers make them? Surely they would prefer a centralized model where the other half of the entangled particle resides in a network switching device so they can charge for switching.
OK now take this a bit further and you can make wireless network cards with unlimited range, keyed to a handful of other network cards. Next thing you know there is a growing peer to peer network whose infrastructure is virtually impossible to disrupt. Private networks can be created whose communications are impossible to intercept.
Cat
How 'bout if everyone who got a phone also plugged in a base station at their house?
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Or, as Bob Cringeley suggested, your car.
Your cell phone carrier could say: your service will cost $X a month, or it will cost $X-Y a month if you get a relay installed in your car or home.
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pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Thing is, your battery has a standby time of 48 hours, but a talk time of what? 1 hour? 90 minutes? Most of that power isn't going to sound circuitry, it's going to the radio, and if your phone is busy relaying a call that radio will be pulling just as much power.
Ah, not just a radio, a powerful radio (relatively speaking), with a shared resources system, the signal strength could be lowered, less drain on the battery, the signal range need only be as great as the distance between you, and the next phone over.
Which is where my whole point of sending a straighter signal comes in, rather than a wide area power wasting brute force attempt (pump enough juice into the transmitter to reach the tower), the range of your signal can be lessened to less than a few dozen feet in an urban enviroment. Pico-cells. Each one supports the other cell callers further from the nearest cell, extending in a chain of small spheres back to the tower, rather than one large sphere that wastes all kind of energy sending random radiation off in all directions as far as it can reach.
-GiH
There is no Sig.
I imagine the power drain is a ratehr annoying point. Even with less power use, the increased activity of the phone will probably warrant another charge indicator: 2 hours talk time, 3 days standby, and 8 hours hop-mode.
Anyways, why not modify this so low-power, discrete antennas can do the job instead of other phones? Putting a small repeater every few light poles on the highway or along streets in areas of poor reception would vastly improve reception (if not coverage) and avoid the need for as many towers.
Cell repeaters could be come low-cost items that people could install on their houses in rural locations, in areas of poor reception, and even inside large buildings/warehouses.
Sure, the phones could still offer peer-hopping should it be needed, but think how much more useful stationary mini-towers would be.
If you don't believe me, think about getting great signal from the lake, and getting disconnected as the car on the highway gets farther away... leaving you stranded for minutes or hours without signal until the next car drives by. Hope you have SMS.
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I'm doing my masters thesis on bluetooth ad hoc mobile routing, and one thing I can say is it is not easy to setup and maintain a routing structure. If you have a sparse distribution of nodes, you may run into connectivity problems, although the algorithms for routing become fast. If you have a dense dist, the routing becomes increasingly toughter, as you will have more pico-nets, gateways, clusterheads, and routing tables to deal with.
Scatternet formation has to be done with a distributed algorithm, since, at the start, no node knows where the others are. There are many more problems with a network like this, for information transmission, like latency, reformulation of the network when nodes move, or are turned on or off.
Now, if cell phone protocols were changed, ie, new cell phones were built to use ad-hoc networks, with cell towers as fixed access points and gateways, the idea will have a good future.
How do they do packet routing?
Imagine a very dense area of repeaters and a tower. Phone A can't talk with the tower but a lot of phones can and moreover there are a lot of phones that both A and the tower-able phones can route over. Is there some form of "Yes, I will route for you" that cascades up the tree and first-come-only-served? So if A can hit B can hit C can hit the tower, then A sends a request, B gets it, broadcasts it *again*, C gets it, knows it can hit the tower, responds to B, which then responds to A?
Anybody know how this really works so I don't have to pull ideas out of my ass? ^_~
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
So turn it off. If you only use it for emergencies then you shouldn't care whether it is on or off, since you don't make or take calls on it unless there is an emergency.
There is a very distinct difference between stand-by and off. One still uses battery power, the other does not. Making the network peer to peer doesn't make your phone use power while it's shut off.
And I don't know what kind of phone you're using if it doesn't still try to check back with the tower every few seconds while in stand-by. Mine sure as hell does. Going underground all day? Then you'd better turn your phone with a "3 day stand-by" off, or else it will be flat dead in under 8 hours. A peer to peer network wouldn't cause this, as each only tries to talk to nearby phones, which in most cases would get your signal back topside within a few hops.
Realistically, I'd question the scalability. I'd SERIOUSLY question the scalability. Gnutella is peer to peer, and it doesn't scale well at all. Even with UltraPeers (peers that actually act more like routers), the network still uses a HELL of a lot of bandwidth. Even when you throw out the power consumption issue, the processing power and bandwidth issues come up.
This is a very interesting idea, though I can't say that I haven't already heard of it. Still, if they can put together 1000 units, and make it work for a week inside of a single building, I'll be impressed.