Since facebook and all the social media warfare, I have realized that the internet is awesome, but not very scalable to embedded devices: new generation network standards are still expensive to make work.
The internet is good for high bandwidth, but the installations are quite static, and I don't really believe that smartphones and tablets will really replace micro-computers in terms of network capabilities.
So my question:
I'm thinking about a CB-radio-like protocol for P2P data transmission.
Do you think a low frequency, long distance, peer-to-peer radio network would be possible ?
If the protocol would provide unencrypted and encrypted mode, do you think people would use it knowing that somebody could try to sniff packets ? Would this kind of physical protocol be possible to integrated on simple phone (does lower frequencies consume more energy ?).
(Could you redirect me to somewhere I could ask this question if you don't have any idea ?)
Best Answer
I'm tempted to say this is a contentious issue for discussion, not something with a "right" answer. However, you could investigate the OLPC Mesh protocol. In general, lower carrier frequencies mean lower bandwidth for data on them. It's not so much that they consume more energy (in fact they have greater range for the same transmit power) but that the antenna gets larger or less efficient if size constrained.
If you are trying to do peer-peer networking on a simple phone, the transmit energy associated with the forwarding of packets could badly affect the battery life.