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."