DARPA Wants Huge Holy Grail of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

coondoggie writes "Even the often far-reaching researchers at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seems to think this one is a stretch: Develop what's known as mobile ad-hoc wireless technology that lets 1000-5000 nodes connect simultaneously and securely in the field. For the past 20 years, researchers have unsuccessfully used Internet-based concepts in attempts to significantly scale mobile ad hoc networks, DARPA said. A constraint with current examples is they can only scale to around 50 nodes before network services become ineffective."

Comments

Your Network's Hairy

[smittyoneeach]

Your network's hairy
Your servers are duds
Only one way to shave it
And that's drown it in suds!
Burma Shave

This problem is more or less solved already

[tlambert]

This problem is more or less solved already. It can be done through ad hoc mesh networking, and there is firmware that can be used on Atheros and several other vendors chips.

The problem with deploying any of this is that the ability to do this with civilian devices disintermediates the cell phone user from the cell network providers. So there are huge buckets of money which Do No Want This Firmware Available Anywhere. Deploy it, and you mostly do not need cellular carriers, unless you need lower-than-voice-acceptable latency on your network for higher speed data (e.g. multiplayer video games).

The half a dozen companies that can already do this include Google; I used to sit about 200 feet from the office of the primary researcher.

Routers.. simple.

[aaronb1138]

For the kind of bandwidth and performance they want, dedicated routers are needed. A pure ad-hoc setup won't work. The network can be self configuring in an ad-hoc like fashion, with routers acting as supernodes and preferably sending some control data for channel / geographic setup and configuration updates.

Being that this is DARPA, they need to talk to their DOD peers who have solved logistics equations and simulations. You don't send 50+ troops into the field all at equal rank together. You have some sergeants and lieutenants to coordinate command and control. Same thing with a mesh building ad-hoc router. Heck, the math side should work out almost exactly the same for number of equipment tiers and number of equipment pieces at each tiers as for troops in the field.

Re:802.11S

[ozmanjusri]

They could just use Android phones with the Serval Project mesh network app installed on them.