Population density and wireless networking: reexamining the world of wireless peer-to-peer networking

MANY PEOPLE retain a perception of peer-to-peer networking based on the old Napster model of file sharing. While that model offers the advantage of lots of users, there is no benefit to having lots of users in close proximity (i.e., high population density).

But wireless peer-to-peer networking--networks using devices that serve as both transceivers and routers for other devices--is gaining broad acceptance in many different vertical markets, including public safety, mass transit and intelligent transportation-systems. And, not surprisingly, it is the more densely populated cities in north Asia like Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo that are among the earliest adopters of this technology. Increased bandwidth and decreased deployment costs are the reasons that north Asia is again at the leading edge of a new wireless technology.

How it works

Wireless peer-to-peer networking, sometimes called "fourth generation" (4G) wireless, was originally conceived by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same organization that developed the wired Internet. It is not surprising, then, that DARPA chose the same distribution architecture for the wireless Internet that had proven so successful in the wired Internet. Peer-to-peer networks eliminate the spoke-and-hub weakness of cellular architectures, because the elimination of a single node does not disable the network--just as the loss of a single router does not disable the wired Internet.

Because users carry much of the network with them, network capacity and coverage are dynamically shifted to accommodate changing user patterns. As people congregate and create pockets of high demand, they also create additional routes for each other, thus enabling additional access to network capacity. Users will automatically hop away from congested routes to less congested routes. This permits the network to dynamically and automatically self-balance capacity, increasing network utilization.

Furthering the economic argument is the 80/20 rule. With traditional wireless networks, about 80 percent of the cost is for site acquisition and installation, and just 20 percent is for the technology. Rising land and labor costs mean installation costs tend to rise over time. With wireless peer-to-peer networking, however, about 80 percent of the cost is the technology and only 20 percent is the installation. Because technology costs tend to decline over time, peer-to-peer networking will become less and less expensive to deploy