This post is something I may want to come back to later; its a personal placeholder for an idea, I guess. While brainstorming with a few colleagues on a ride to dinner the other evening, I wondered how you could develop a highly distributed, incredibly cheap, wireless network. Or, put another way, I wondered how I could check email from the car without an expensive GPRS system. I had some ideas, but I also knew that other people must be playing in this area—it’s a hard, open problem.
Two people came up in my poking around:
- A Google search for massively distributed wireless networks turned up an abstract for a paper by Andrea Goldsmith (abstract, presentation (PPT), homepage, CiteSeer searches [author, title]).
- Yaron Minsky’s thesis (homepage, CiteSeer entry)
Related, but not. I can’t find a paper associated with the presentation, which seems to be applicable (my guess is some of Andrea’s other papers would apply, and I’d have to assemble pieces to get the full picture). I haven’t really examined Yaron’s thesis yet, but I’m noting it here because, at a glance, I think there is likely something valuable in looking at the gossip protocols for ad-hoc networks.
No, this has nothing to do with my work, but this blog is a place to jot down notes related to my thoughts and work. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes its on CS-ED, sometimes its just me being a computer scientist who has a lot of interests. I’ll try and get back on topic soon enough.