Re: Meshing costs, the price of RAH's battery
At 07:06 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
RAH wrote...
At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message?
Only if they pay me cash
Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity.
One can run a P2P app from mains-powered home machine and incur only a minor bandwidth penalty, which you can possibly throttle when you're busy. But my understanding of *mobile* devices (where meshing matters) is that they are severely power constrained. To the extent that boozohol power cells and various semiconductor/logic tricks are being used, despite the difficulties they require. So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*.
Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the "weighting" factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time
lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route.
The traffic-fraction and the extrapolation of Moore's 'law' are largely irrelevant for the next decade. In fact, given that standby usage will *decrease* relative to transmit usage only makes the relative proportions worse. I don't care if you use a picoamp on standby/listen, you'll still need a few milliwatts to forward a packet. Or more, if there are no nearby cooperative nodes. Sure, in the distant future, mobile power may so vastly dominate power usage that meshes become practical. (There's even positive feedback, the more meshnodes the less transmit power.) Meantime, uncompensated altruism is maladaptive. With something like soldier-radios, or smart dusts, meshes will happen sooner, since the Many eat the Few. For *your* cellphone, you have a *long* time to wait for it to be Rational to share your battery with randoms. In RAH's defense, mesh-everything is not necessary for the disintermediation, which he idiosyncratically calles 'geodesic' info flow, to have big effects. Neither is a geodesic (in any physical or otherwise meaningful sense) net important. Just cheaper info to more people. And that's been happening since before ponies carried dead trees with stamps. Re-reading RAH's "if they pay me enough" reply, it is also right that a price can be set on the wattage you've sherpa'ed, perhaps so that you can pay off your usage of said mesh by letting others use your batteries. And the micropayments will be feasible thanks to real cheap info + crypto, what RAH's undiagnosed brain tumor labels geodesic info flow. Perhaps the price of being a meshrouter to others will even depend on the wattage you have left. Your phone will negotiate with Fred's phone (has 10 Joules left but is 1000 m away) and Joe's (has 5 Joules but is 100 m away). But that's economics/physics applied to resource usage, nothing new, despite the neologisms and extrapolation.
At 9:03 PM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
he idiosyncratically calles 'geodesic' info flow
Hey, I use it, and it's right, but it's not mine.
It comes from Peter Huber's "The Geodesic Network", circa 1986, and he's
right, too.
I'd say check the archives, but that would be -- rather ironically, in your
case -- rude.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
At 9:03 PM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*.
Yes, and as your battery starts to run out, you raise the price on switching.
Your point is?
The cost of anything is the foregone alternative, and all that.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 09:03:35PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
One can run a P2P app from mains-powered home machine and incur only a minor bandwidth penalty, which you can possibly throttle when you're busy. But my
Most P2P clients don't support this, so one better does QoS tweaks at the firewall. The Draytek Vigor line of routers allows you to define VLANs, and assign those to switch ports, and throttle these in small increments. DSL lines are deeply buffered, so pushing out traffic as fast as you can plugs up the FIFO, soon resulting in killer lag. Unfortunately, few PCs cruise the Net without NAT firewalls, and these are typically braindead, and have no hooks for P2P apps other than UPnP.
understanding of *mobile* devices (where meshing matters) is that they are severely power constrained. To the extent that boozohol power cells and various semiconductor/logic tricks are being used, despite the difficulties they require.
Some nodes are power constrained (mobile phones), some are not (cars, planes). Ultrawideband is intrinsically low-power (integrated, the pulses are 200 W or above). Positioning include pingpong, so you could easily use that payload for SMS relaying. Furthermore, ad hoc mesh is a mode. You can go into ad hoc when outside of more immobile infrastructure. If you don't have to compress voice, drive the display and transducers, etc, pure relay for precompressed voice packets is tolerable. You don't have to do it all the time, so you can specify the degree of whether you're a defector, or a good guy. All power management issues are irrelevant for immobile nodes and for energy-glut nodes. Solar-powered immobile nodes is a good idea (I've looking at cheapest ways to build them), but they have power management issues during nighttime. Also, there's snow on the panels and thermostating problems in harsher climes.
So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*.
If the network is agoric, you're getting good mana in exchange for your juice. The amount of your mana varies, depending on local market prices.
Sure, in the distant future, mobile power may so vastly dominate power usage that meshes become practical. (There's even positive feedback, the more meshnodes the less transmit power.)
Yes.
Meantime, uncompensated altruism is maladaptive.
But that's economics/physics applied to resource usage, nothing new, despite the neologisms and extrapolation.
I stopped using geodesic routing a while ago, because I found out the proper term is geographic routing. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
participants (3)
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Eugen Leitl -
Major Variola (ret) -
R. A. Hettinga