On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Tony Finch wrote:
> Yes, but consume is intended to suppoprt mobile computers so how do
> you define their location in order to give them an IP address?
I have three answers to that one. Consume nodes form an irregular mesh
spanned over sections of Earth surface. You typically see one or several
of them when you're cruising. So they can assign a more or less meaningful
address, which adds a fuzziness mask to the address word. This does not
require the nodes have any geographic clue at all, all they do is generate
a rough map of Earth by mutual communication (I see you, you see me, tell
me who you're seeing via direct LoS, okay, iterate), similiar to domain
crystallization. I don't have code, but it works in my head.
Of course, typically you'd want to provide a few anchor nodes acting as
crystallization nuclei, so the the domains are properly aligned and
intermesh seamlessly when they bump into each other in their growth
process, by assigning the address from WGS84 GPS coordinates by hand, or
by attaching a GPS receiver to the /dev/ttySx. A node will be more certain
(less bits in the fuzziness mask) if it sees genuine meaningful 24 ct NMEA
sentences. This also provides a nuke-grade time standard (my Garmin OEM 25
has an second pulse output with microsecond jitter, which you could pipe
into printer port, see RTLinux with Comedi drivers), a good thing to have
in any system. Notice at the bulk of cellphones will soon come with GPS
integrated. Also, we have navigation systems which will contain GPS and
3-axis MEMS accelerometers, resulting in robust high-res navigation
systems which also work indoors. Count them to become rather common in the
next decade.
The third stage rather late in the game is to use mutual time of flight
measurements to create a local posititioning system using digital pulse
radio technology (see Aetherwire). Once you have that, you don't need GPS.
You'll probably need SiGe custom chips for that (though computer cowboys
like Chuck Moore can do cm-resolution timers in vanilla 0.8 um CMOS, god
only knows how). This will come also quite soon, unless they outlaw
digital pulse radio.
Notice that this only gives node position. Node identity is some randomly
generated large binary integer, the node's public key. Node ID is a
constant, whereas node address depends on the node's current location.
I hope above stuff did not came over as gibberish.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:54 PDT