Mesh networks at a small scale …
This is an awesome article that outlines the current state of mesh network R&D at the military level. Mesh networks are going to be the next generation of wireless networking … where every wireless node becomes a “repeater” for the rest of the nodes. With this architecture, nodes are able to “relay” messages for other nodes increasing the distance over which nodes can communicate, and also increasing the fault tolerance of the entire network.
There are numerous examples of where mesh networking is going to be very powerful. Groups of people who are working together in a geographic area can now create a large mesh network that is fully distributed, and requires no central “access point”. Imagine fire fighters out in a wilderness area fighting a major forest fire. Each fire fighter is wearing a mesh networking radio, and becomes a node in a mesh network with all of the other fire fighters. As they become spread out fighting the fire, they are all relaying communications traffic back and forth between each other. If any two firefighters become separated by a ridge or other physical obstruction, they will still be able to communicate if there are other fire fighters in between them.
I can see this expanding even further into personal communications, or even automobile communications. If your car was a node in a mesh network, then communicating from car to car on a highway might enable large groups of cars to have Internet connectivity if any one of the cars was able to get to the net.
At Comdex this last week, I was able to see a demonstration and presentation by one of the first commercial vendors of this type of technology. Mesh Networks is the company … and there will be many more of them …