First day in University started just as the University in Vienna: Sleeping until 12, breakfast, then show up at some point for the lecture (3pm). Well, they’ll move it to 9am, so that’s that.
Ubiquitous computing: Small computers you use but aren’t necessary aware of. They are just there, all the time, carryable (or not), multipurpose. PDAs and mobile phones are the more obvious ones.
For a research project theme I’m thinking about doing research for store-and-forward protocols using inhomogenous, non-persistent networks.
Imagine walking through a busy street, people having mobile phones, PDAs, etc. Imagine you would have fast means of connecting these devices (e.g. BlueTooth, Wireless) and send short messages in the seconds while people pass by you. A message can hop from device to device to ultimately reach its destination (a phone, the internet, …).
Think of people making the net rather then the net coming from outside and people being attached to it.
For the technical side: Surely only short messages are of interest. But these can be any kind of data (e.g. TXT aka SMS, pictures). Every phone can yell “I am 123″, “I am looking for 234″. Assuming phones have some storage, the devices can build up a tree of phones they have seen (some very dynamic routing protocol). Messages can then be passed (or copied) in the hope they’ll reach the destination in this direction.
For the security side: The data may be encrypted. The phone numbers for routing can be hashed.
But think of a twitter network available even after an earthquake destroyed the mobile network transmitters. Some devices may support GPS, so positions can be approximately recorded. This might ease finding people (if they want to be found). If the net gets sufficiently dense (think Manhattan), a really efficient network might emerge where you can reach people in real-time.
Obviously these thoughts have issues, but I’m interested in what research was done by people in this area. I’ll not make research on this myself, and probably not doing field-testing or programming (well maybe routing protocols on simulators).
#1 by Concept Rat on August 5th, 2009
Hey I’m liking this concept. I remember reading about some app for Symbian phones that could send SMS type messages between other Symbian phones using this software. I seem to remember it would also track the connections (users) that had passed and could alert you when they come past again. This is sort of like a mesh network for phones that you’re talking about right? By the way I’m working in the Bioengineering Institute at University of Auckland. THere’s some pretty top heavy people up here. Perhaps you could make it for a visit or drop by one of the talks on Tuesday@4pm or Friday 9am :)