Comment by angott
7 years ago
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.
7 years ago
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that mobile phones can move around, leading to high rates of dropped connections as devices come and go. There's no way this is going to work.
Whoops, my phone connected to someone on a train that just went past! My phone call just dropped.
Think of it the opposite way. You have no coverage, are trying to get a message out and the nearest gateway is miles away. A moving car/train is close to you for plenty of time to transfer a few 100 bytes, and someone in the car/train has a mesh aware widget. It stores a copy and waits to go near a gateway where it upload it for you.
Sure, it's not as nice as a WAN connection, but the average cellular contract is pretty expensive per month. Something like $10 per GB, and often a $30 and up base rate.
So sure, long distance multi-hop mesh stinks for real time voice, but could be quite usable for other use cases.
Ah, but now you're talking about solving an additional problem, delay tolerant networking, on top of mesh networking. This adds a whole new layer of complexity on top of the mesh network, and would probably only work as you say for a subset of services that are made to handle this type of unreliable network.
Also many common delay tolerant network implementations rely on message replication to increase the probability of delivery of the message. This puts additional bandwidth strain on the inter-node hops of the network, which as some of the other commenters pointed out, not actually all that high.
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Why would your call be routed just via one single phone?
Are you going to send the message over more than one route? That doubles the required bandwidth over the entire mesh.
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Cellular phone deal with this when you are in motion anyway. You just need redundant routes to offset the volatility of the network. A half mile per hop range could work, if the network is sufficiently dense (and the number of egress points is sufficiently high).
This is the kind of thing you do a test with in a specific targeted community though...