Slashdot Mirror
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."
Ultra wideband to transmit 100 mbs wirelessly (but only for distances of 10 feet...).
Also accomplished by tossing DVD's back and forth....what's the point of that? I mean, only ten feet? Why not just use a cable at that point?
What's your damage, Heather?
there are several good articles about uwb at UWBPlanet. It appears the Economist is quite wrong about UWB.
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.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
the little sticker you put on the back of your cell phone to increase range. Isn't that an emerging wireless technology???
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Me: Hey Joe, got that file?
:)
Joe: Yeah, it's on a floppy.
Me: Toss it here.
Joe: Frisbee's the Floppy across the room (20 ft. [6.1 meters]).
Me: Catches floppy (Sure it was aimed at my head).
Me: Thanks.
Joe: Make sure it gets to Mike tomorrow.
Me: Ok. (uses sneaker net)
Look familiar?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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.
IANANE(I am not a network engineer), but it seems to me that widespread mesh and ad hoc networks decentralized nature might prove difficult to "police". Already we see Snort and other tools designed to break into exsisting WiFi networks. The distributed nature of these new networks would lend itself to such attacks. While strong encryption would prevent a properly configured station from being cracked, the real problem with WiFi and perhaps these new networks is foolish people leaving them wide open. Then there is the question of accountablity. What happens when my feed starts providing resticted intellectual property like "Oops!...I did it again"? Just who gets sued. Present laws dictate that ISPs are not liable as long as they take steps to immediately cut the source. Assuming, you would be protected under such a law it seems to me the central feature of the network(relaying others data) is discouraged by legal the standards.
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...
Couldn't really think of a better/propper name for it. But, I'm referring to that .. "activity" where a piece of mail was given to someone, and they were told a destination. So it'd pass through a shop owner to a company to a branch in a different country and get to the president sort of thing.. basically, just "fling" it and it starts going in the right direction.
This was thought of with routing. But, it can't work as things are set up now. The reason this works is because they're all grouped. Continents, countries, shop owners, policical candidates and such... computers are just 192.168.0.5. The other IP's can be given out randomly to any place at all.
Antennas like this, if they were to route in the same way, would need to know where they are, where the message wanted to go, in the physical world. Then the other antennas would need to be able to determine if they were between the source and the destination. And to prevent duplicate messages, tell people "I got it!!" like a football game(...).
so.. basically I'm saying until the way computers are groupped/assigned IP's is done in some logical manner like countries, the "human" (flinging? just send it out and hope it gets tehre...) form of routing won't work with computers.
just my comments on a topic that was brought up before..
-DrkShadow
From Slashdot: 4) Ultra wideband to transmit 100 mbs wirelessly (but only for distances of 10 feet...).
From the article: 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.
The first thing, the Slashdot post makes it sound like 10 ft is the maximum UWB can go, and second, its 10 METERS not 10 FEET
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.