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New Wireless Technologies
Codex The Sloth writes "The Economist has an article on 4 emerging wireless technologies: (1) Smart Antennas for improved base-station capacity, (2) Mesh Networks to make each wireless reciever also be a relay,
(3) Ad hoc networking to use network devices as routers, (4) Ultra wideband to transmit 100 mbs wirelessly (but only for distances of 10 feet...). Some of these are already in use while others are still in the lab."
Why not just use a cable at that point?
A cable is probably fine if the stations aren't moving, but that is not necessarily the case. One can easily imagine robots which will be moving around within a single room; even though the range would be sufficient, any cable could very easily get tied into knots.
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What kind of latency does this add up to? I mean thats really the weakest link when it comes to doing things that require fast response like online games. It's not neccesarily how much data that can get there in a specific time but how quickly you can get the data to a location.
10 feet isn't that bad because it's not a limit of the technology, it's a limit of the FCC. If there's not interference at 10 feet, they'll up the allowable range. Also, the 10 foot range is presumably using omnidirectional antennas. You could presumably get better range using smart antennas, as long as your total emissions weren't high.
10 Meters (~33 feet)not 10 feet. This distance is FCC limited. It sounds it could be capible of greater distances.
The FCC ruling limits the range of UWB transmissions to about ten metres, although longer ranges may be allowed in future once the question of interference has been sorted out. However, UWB is capable of a data rate of at least 100 megabits per second over such distances.
Great question. It turns out that ad hoc network capacity is limited; in a randomly moving network, with sane discovery procedures, bandwidth per user goes down at some suprising rate. However, if your communications are local, that isn't a big deal. Also, several research groups have looked into cluster-based routing as a way to make things scale better, so only cluster-heads need to route amongst themselves, and the other nodes just go through the cluster heads.
I suppose gnutella could also benefit from such an architecture... I seem to recall that some P2P systems have "supernodes." However, the attractiveness of p2p systems is that they're really hard to shut down; 0wning all the supernodes would hurt. (Not shutting them down, just making them stop forwarding requests) Also, if one of these evil companies that advertise using P2P becomes a supernode, there's no end to the evil that company can perpetrate.
This is all a vast oversimplification, of course...
It would be nice if the editors read the articles prior to hastily posting references to them. In such an ideal situation, the text could have been corrected to read "10 meters," not feet, which makes much more sense.
Not that wireless networking of 10 feet wouldn't be useful in and of itself. Even then I wouldn't have to face the dilemma - in my apartment - of how to implement a fast network between the servers in the lab downstairs and the workstations in the office upstairs without stringing an ethernet cable through a door and up a wall (and without making any holes).