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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."
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.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.