.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

I’ve been reading a lot of speculative fiction, near future sci fi, and of course it sets my mind in motion. Then I see news articles and videos that just add fuel. One such video struck me in a peculiar way, not merely because of what the video was about, but also because of where the technology could go.

Here’s the video

Of course there are military applications. That much is apparent in the video. But we have a history of taking objects of war and applying them creatively to peacetime pursuits. What really struck me is how these bugbots could be repurposed to do non-military things (even though the use that occurred to me also has obvious military uses). To give you a little background, let me point you to a grad school paper I wrote in 2006 called Extending Darknets. I won’t embed it here, since that would make the posting a little on the long side, but here’s the gist: I outlined ways in which someone could build wireless ad hoc networks that could be hardened against common wireless exploits like eavesdropping and denial of service. At the time I originally wrote it, mobile devices were not big players on the web, and very few people thought of them as capable internet devices, much less network routers. While I don’t expect that to change in the near term (5-10 years), in the next near term, we may see advances in miniaturization (nano scale assembly) that can pack incredibly complex and powerful devices into suprisingly small packages. The question is whether one could take something the size of these bugbots and make them into network routers capable of flying to areas of suboptimal coverage, selecting the best spot to set up shop, and sitting there doing what they do until they break.

Here’s the scenario I imagine: Someone gets a swarm of bugbots and puts wireless mesh routing software in the bugs’ SSDs. Something based on AntHocNet, maybe something more sophisticated. That person adds some geolocation data and remote sensing software to let the bugs calculate coverage maps. To a degree, it’s not even necessary for the bugs to have GPS. If they can calculate a route to something that DOES provide GPS-like functionality, like a stationary femtocell with a known coordinate set, then they don’t need to waste time with ral GPS. Their goal would be to optimize distance between nodes such that signal strength can be maintained and network hops are minimized. With faster ad hoc networking protocols, the number of hops can increase without adding latency. The bugbots themselves are equipped with solar cells and accelerometer-powered dynamos at the least, plus lithium-ion or other rechargeable batteries to keep them running for hopefully months or years. They need not be self-repairing or self-replicating, although these are natural advances that one might pursue. Once they are all ready to go, or perhaps one at a time or in small groups, someone releases them to settle around the city. They choose where they need to go to maintain low-latency communication with at least one but preferably two neighbors (some maximum has to be imposed too, else they’ll all cluster around the base station). They can fly and crawl, so they don’t need someone to go and install them. They figure out based on time of day and prevailing light conditions where to position themselves to run off of gathered power, relying on batteries as a fallback, so they shouldn’t need much maintenance, and they can be remotely flashed when updates need to be distributed.

Sound crazy? Right now it is. The wireless spectrum may not have enough bandwidth to make something like this possible. That’s just one challenge, probably the most significant, but there are others. Can they be overcome? Maybe. Below I list out some challenges that I see, along with some potential solutions.

• Bandwidth in Wireless Spectrum: It depends on what we’re transmitting as to whether we can improve communications over such a network. 3G and 4G show us some plausible paths, so whoever does something like this should explore those in greater detail.
• Mobile Ad Hoc Routing: Let’s face it: current routing protocols are slow when applied to a mobile ad hoc network, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a great deal of recent work on improving the mobile routing protocols. ANODR, AntHocNet, and the like are not exactly new. They could use some more research.
• Battery Life: Right now, mobile devices doing 3G or wifi are serious battery hogs. My feeling is that decreasing some of the component sizes will also lower the power requirements, but will that be enough? doing this well almost certainly depends on advances in battery technology as well as improvements in solar cells and kinetic energy recapture technologies.
• Security: Current tools to harden systems against eavesdropping often impose significant processing costs; the tradeoff will be power requirements. Improvements in security layers will increase the feasibility.
• Robustness: This is similar to the bandwidth limitation and the routing protocol limitation, but it’s worth noting that simply removing enough nodes can destroy the network, making parts of it difficult or impossible to traverse. Further, signal noise or saturation can cause effective denial of service. A potential solution is for the routing protocols to detect signal gaps and attempt to compensate. Standby units at the base station could be deployed on an ad hoc basis to cover emerging gaps. As far as saturation goes, using some sort of frequency hopping algorithm will help, but adds processing costs.
• Theft, Vandalism, Reverse Engineering, Trust Compromise: In the case that bugbot units are captured, they could be subverted and sent back out to rejoin the network. Hopefully they will be out of reach for most people, but there are always a few who are determined enough to try. The other possibility is that someone reverse engineers a bugbot and releases intuders masquerading as trusted agents. This is not something I have an answer for just yet.

So, what do you think? Plausible or not? What are some of the challenges you see? Are there solutions you can think of?