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Wireless Networks That Build Themselves
ScienceDaily has an interesting article that looks at ad-hoc wireless networks and how they might be even more useful on a large scale. The RUNES project is featured as an example of software projects that might be able to make mobile devices that form self-organizing wireless networks to help promote this goal. "RUNES set out to create middleware: software that bridges the gap between the operating systems used by the mobile sensor nodes, and high-level applications that make use of data from the sensors. RUNES middleware is modular and flexible, allowing programmers to create applications without having to know much about the detailed working of the network devices supplying the data. This also makes it easy to incorporate new kinds of mobile device, and to re-use applications."
What happens if your mobile device forms a node over which someone else gets child porn?
...that malware writers will LOVE this. Free propagation, just add mesh!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
neat
Step 1: Set up a node(s) at the very edge of a mesh network. Step 2: Install software to execute a man in the middle attack. Step 3: Wait for someone to connect to you alone. Step 4: Wait for that someone to connect to their bank. Step 5: Drain their account. It'll take some clever protocols to prevent abuse if this ever gets used as a standard consumer network protocol, but it should do wonders for emergency services.
The internet was designed to route around bottlenecks and network damage. ISP control is a type of bottleneck regardless of the amount of bandwidth.
Thus a natural progression to further decentralization is exactly what is happening. Expect to see ISP trying to pressure legislators to ban this kind of technology, and spreading FUD about.
Runes Homepage for those who want more depth.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A wireless sensor node like the Tmote Sky(pdf) is a very tiny embedded computer that runs on 2 AA batteries, and is usually the size of the back of the 2 AA battery holder. They have a radio on it, but the radio isn't compatible with 802.11b instead compatible with 802.15.4, and is limited to about 256kbps. The Tmote Sky has a 8MHz 8-bit processor (the Atmega 128), 10KiB of ram, 1024KiB of flash, with a few A-D inputs and some digital outputs. It isn't exactly very fast, nor does it have a bunch of ram.
It is designed for a distributed sensor platform, and not doing a lot of computation.
A picture of one is here, connected to a 14-foot USB cable.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I came up with a concept one night for a Fractaly Organized Nearby Transient Area Interface NEtwork (FONTAINE) in which each device had 3 Transceivers which would connect to a different device on the network, which in turn connected to 3 other devices etc. it would be infinitely scaleable and each device would carry a map of all the connections in the network. Once logged into the network your device would constantly search out the strongest signals and update transceivers one at a time. If one node gets overloaded it would send a signal to the other nodes to shift paths. Internet access would require stable nodes that have a high bandwidth or even more than 3 transceivers. If each device contains basically its own 3 port router you can expand networks in say a convention center with out running into a capacity problem. This would also work well for a mobile communication device in a densely populated city.
Feel free to use the concept, but please keep the name.
The Eggman
Fear the power of NTie!
The article talks about everything from motes to handhelds, all on the same network. I work for a company that has a low-bandwidth low-power sensor node product, selling software to hardware makers, and hardware for prototyping purposes. The requirements vary so much from sensor-only devices to handhelds, that any product catering for both would be inherently compromised. Does your handheld want to work with a network that has a total bandwidth like modems from 20 years ago, shared between all the nodes? Is it really concerned with keep power emissions so low that it can stay on that network for 10 years, powered by batteries? how about a sensor attached to your radiator?
Techies tend to think about what CAN be done with a certain technology, but sometimes we try and generalise too far
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
Sounds like open standard *Zigbee* http://zigbee.org/ networks. Been hearing about Ember http://ember.com/ chipsets and self-healing, self-discovery wireless mesh networks for a few years now. Pretty quiet as of late.
"How they'd be funded, I have no idea." I do. Charge the urban areas a heckuva lot more for their incredibly cheap subsidized water, still cheap food (although that is changing rapidly, finally some fairer prices out there), and delivered electricity and natural gas, all (most, anyway) of which comes from the rural areas.
End the stealth internal colonial exploitation and a lot more rural people would be able to adequately afford broadband or mesh networks, etc. No handouts needed, just pay a fair trade price rather than mooch off the government seizing assets basically at gunpoint and transferring them cheaply where more concentrated votes live.
Having said that, phishing is still described as highly successful, social engineering is usually described as highly effective, and there are probably a few places where wardiallers can access unsecured lines to financial computer systems. Besides which, most people are lousy at securing their home computers, so I suspect that most attackers aiming at individuals would use keystroke loggers embedded in viruses or placed on a machine after using some public script. Most homes are not secure, either, so you could do just about as well with a powerful receiver and decoder for the output of computer monitors. People are often very bad about destroying sensitive documents, which is why dumpster diving is also said to be very effective.
In short, why would anyone hang around on the edge and wait for a single victim, when that would be slower and riskier than any of the alternatives, and produce just one possibility versus hundreds or thousands for the others?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
DSDV
OLSR
AODV
Babel.
If you have watched the Terminator movies you know that it was self organizing and linked computers that became sentient (sort of) and decided to kill off the human race. Truth is stranger than fiction. Nowadays I guess they can just link up all the voting machines and pick a computer as a write in President.
Although TFA doesn't say whether these are peer-to-peer networks, I suspect they are. The best theoretical aggregate bandwidth you can get out of a set of mesh-connected peers scales as sqrt(n) in the number of nodes, which isn't that great. In most practical mesh systems, the total bandwidth goes DOWN as you add peers. Until somebody figures out a better way to organize ad-hoc mesh networks, they really won't be all that useful for most applications.
Any bandwidth greater than zero over a multi-hop link is an improvement over the status quo, in which that sort of thing typically just isn't supported. Ad-hoc networks are slow (I'm not sure where the sqrt(n) comes from), but they are very practical in situations where a star topology isn't practical, and you want something that just works, right now, without a lot of manual configuration.