On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Marcus Leech <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I'd be *very* interested to compare the distribution on a wired network. >> It seems to me that given >> the broadcast model, everybody should see everybody else in much >> shorter time than the 55 seconds >> shown in the outlying cluster on that graph.
Marcus, this is indeed an interesting idea. However it has a significant problem: wiring up more than 60 XOs onto a switch requires equipment, time and space that OLPC cannot presently provide. Such a testbed though is absolutely necessary not only as a proof of concept for your suggestion, but also for doing large scale mesh network testing in general. > > The common, but erroneous, assumption is often made that a wireless > network is just like a wired network, but with the wires removed. > So very true! > On a wireless network, broadcasts are successfully received with much > lower probability. RF is mysterious and magical, and all sorts of > connection asymmetries, near-field effects, and radiation lobe > patterns conspire to make it unlikely that *everyone* can hear you > equally at once -- and then you get into remote collisions and other > mechanisms that make you unaware that not everyone heard you. And > there is not 'ack' mechanism for 802.11 broadcast. > All these are true also, but I think we're mystifying things a little bit here. The wireless medium is unpredictable mainly because its properties are also a function of time (a non-issue in wired networks), but at least (thank God!) it [the wireless medium] does not discriminate between broadcast and unicast frames! Adding an ack scheme to broadcasts should yield equal (or even better due to lowered speed) reliability using broadcast frames. Even without the ack scheme, I noticed that, on average, some 95% of the data transmitted over broadcast are successfully received on all nodes. We are throwing this away by discarding it on our wireless interfaces. Pol -- Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos Graduate student Viral Communications MIT Media Lab Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058 http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
