From: Bob Frankston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: May 13, 2007 1:42:50 PM EDT
Subject: RE: [IP] Harvard, BBN Use Streetlamps to Light Up Wireless
Network
This is the kind of story that sounds wonderful until you
think about it. Other than waiting for the funding how can
it take 3 years to deploy 100 Linux PCs? Or may 3 years is
the time it takes to get the city government to say OK. This
is the kind of dependency that assures Moore's law is
thwarted.
Why not just look for 100 Harvard students (or students at
any of the many other schools in the area) to place sensors
outside their windows and plug them into the outlets already
available in apartments and, even better, use their existing
access points and even computers. But that would be no fun
-- you'd deploy in 2007 and then have to report results
rather than write about how hard it was to create the
sensornet.
First a technical detail. This assumes that the street lamps
have power even when the lights are off. Many lights are run
in series. Are the lamps now controlled by sending a signal
to the lamp itself to turn and/off or are the lights
controlled at the power source.
The idea of putting up sensors and networking them should be
pretty straightforward -- they are just getting power from a
convenient source and otherwise there is nothing special
about the source.
What is wrong is that they are so excited at building their
own special network - they are borrowing 802.11 protocols
from the Internet and then building their own spanking new
network and must deploy with sufficient density to form
their own private special mesh. And thus they create a hard
problem that can be used to generate research papers and
tenure.
Once again there is a failure to get the concept of the
Internet -- why can't they use any path available? This
isn't really end-to-end because they are highly dependent
upon building their own path rather than using the ambient
connectivity that should be available.
I understand why this kind of project is attractive -- I've
seen business plans along the same lines and have had to try
to explain that there's this thing called the Internet ...
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