Coming Soon, Roadcasting

ByteWoopy writes "from Wired.com 'Stuck in traffic and sick of Howard Stern, you may soon be able to tune in to the music collection of the person in the car in front of you. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing an ad hoc networking system for cars that would allow any driver to broadcast music to any other vehicle within a 30-mile radius. Developed by a group of current and former master's students at the Human Computer Interaction Institute, the Roadcasting project would allow drivers to stream their MP3 music collections by Wi-Fi or similar technology to any other vehicle within range that is equipped with compatible hardware and software. '"

Comments

Listen to whose music?

[YrWrstNtmr]

I'd rather just set this up at the house, and 'cast to my car.

Of course, the FCC and RIAA will be all over this.

'Public performance'
'clogging the spectrum'
'private radio stations'

May be a good concept, but the implementation will be a bitch.

Network Traffic

[Doc Ruby]

Instead of a point-to-point application, this tech must become a P2P medium to have any value. Not only do populations of neighboring cars change constantly, quickly, and with little warning (use your blinkers!), but who wants to interact with the mostly random person in the car next to you? Maybe a cocommuter friend somewhere else in a 15-minute pod of traffic, but not the mostly random guy picking his nose and karaoking to "Sister Christian" in the Hyundai that just cut you off.

Meshes of short-range, low-power highway devices can, instead, form a medium layer in a TCP/IP network. Nothing about the neighboring cars' identity matters, just that they support the protocol, and have enough spatial density. Then they can bridge the gap to high bandwidth hops to the Internet. Along the way, they can aggregate traffic data, which can inform traffic jockeys and drivers to optimize flow (though, ironically, reduce necessary density). This project is a nice demo, but it needs to get buried in the protocol stack before the rubber really meets the road.