Slashdot Mirror
HighWLAN
Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Pity they didn't setup Voice over IP.
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
Dave did his PhD thesis on the idea of routing packets between a bunch of wavelan cards moving all over the place. If you play up the military side of it (imagine every soldier/tank with wavelan, routing packets between them!) DARPA likes to fund this kind of stuff.
Anyways, the most fun was had when Dave and his colleagues rented a fleet of cars, put a wavelan equipped laptop in each one (since this was a while ago, they were using the original 2Mb wavelan, not this 802.11b stuff), and were driving all over Pittsburgh trying to see how well packets would get through between cars....
You could use the SuperPeer concept from p2p software. Certain cars could auto-negotiate (sorry for the pun) to be the preferred paths for vehicles around them.
Moving on, I couldn't guess at how you'd make it work, but you could have seamless hops, so you could produce wireless "conduits" out of a sequence of cars. When a car moved out of range or another was preferred, the "conduit" could change a node without interfering with the communications.
A tree structure would probably work best here. Have the "trunk" nodes near physical access points, the "branches" move away from the trunks out into traffic, and the "leaf" nodes are the end communicators.
Of course, It would probably be best to have a number of these wireless "trees" covering the same area to reduce lag and signal loss. Each access point could define it's own channel, and be spread out so each channel is far enough from the others.
Of course, maybe I'm insane.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit