Macaw

I'm changing the format of the posts as Randy wants more of a discussion. The "this is what the paper was about stuff" isn't valuable for that, it should be interesting observations alone.

I aggressively skimmed this paper, as I know most of the wireless stuff pretty well. In macaw, they are assuming "symmetry" among the nodes, which is actually much different from what's actually done. Wireless, like DTN, is generally only a one-hop technology. You use wireless to get to a wire. This is of course different in sensor nets, and a few other applications. So the focus on having all nodes be equal was somewhat strange.

I like it though, as I feel that wireless's flexibility isn't highly utilized. You can, if we figured out this wireless thing, get n^2 connections of n machines without rewiring. The limitation on this is the spectrum required, which would not scale with n. In particular, it would start running off into reserved spectrum pretty quickly.

Now, this wouldn't be of value in home computers, as there are few connections between home computers. It's all to some massive server somewhere. However, in a constrained area that has many peer-to-peer connections (oh, a datacenter or a sensor net) this would be fantastic.

Datacenters are currently out of scale for this, and sensor nets do it. I think the first might be able to be solved.

The next paper will have me musing on the inherent differences between wired and wireless, which will explain why the above may not be feasible.