Meshing costs, the price of RAH's battery

[Major Variola (ret)]

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.