Meshing costs, the price of RAH's battery

[Eugen Leitl]

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>
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