editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Proximal Networks

I was keyed into the concept of the “proximal network” by the AllJoyn network, conceived by Qualcomm and managed by the AllSeen Alliance. I started poking around to learn more about proximal networks and to see which other ones might exist.

What I found was that there are two different senses of proximal network, although they share a conceptual basis.

Once concept is what you might call a mesh network for cellular. That concept notes that, if you make a cell call or send a text to a person 20 feet away from you (hey, it could happen…), then that call might travel a mile to a tower and then a mile ±20 ft back. This works up until the point where the tower gets overloaded.

What if a phone-to-phone network could be set up where the call simply went the 20 feet? Calls or data could hop from phone to phone to their destination, bypassing the towers.

There are some obvious issues to be worked for this to happen, not the least of which is the fact that the cell providers lose some control and visibility – unless, perhaps, the phones themselves radio back to HQ to report every call that passed through. My sense when reading up on this was that this might be the biggest barrier to deployment.

Traffic would also have to be managed somehow to figure out which phones would carry a given call. Would it be limited to phones that aren’t in use? Or would streams be multiplexed so that, even if you’re on a call, another call could silently pass through? And would there be enough processing power?

There’s also the security issue: a phone owner should have access only to his or her own call/data stream. Any other streams passing through the phone would have to be inaccessible to the phone owner. And… I guess there would need to be a hand-off mechanism in case someone shuts down their phone or goes out of range while someone else’s stream is moving through it.

Such a network, however, has nothing to do with AllJoyn. AllJoyn is a home network – think Internet of Things (IoT) – where Things can discover and communicate with other Things in their proximity. In particular, it’s transport-agnostic, and can bind together Things using different transport protocols as long as there is one Thing in the network that supports both protocols, and can therefore act as the bridge. At present, it’s been implemented over WiFi, WiFi-Direct, Ethernet, and Powerline. Others, like Bluetooth LE, are open for implementation.

The focus with AllJoyn is on interoperability – being able to take diverse Things with diverse transports and get them all talking to each other in a manner that’s accessible to your average person.

Note that AllJoyn typically can’t penetrate a firewall simply because of the network address translation (NAT) issue. Inside the home, you’re using private IP addresses; at the gateway, it all gets translated to your single public IP address. The private addresses for Things aren’t public, and they get lost when they cross the firewall.

I started to speculate on ways that such a protocol could bridge across firewalls, although it would only apply to Things that ran over IP. But I decided that this was speculation of a not-particularly-useful kind. As AllJoyn is defined, it doesn’t do this, and communication can’t pass through the firewall. Which, critically, means that someone shouldn’t be able to penetrate your firewall and fish around for your Things.

The common thread between these two different concepts is that networks should be defined by what’s in the neighborhood, not by what protocol is running. In the cellular mesh idea, you might use some other transport mechanism to get to a neighboring phone in the same manner that Things running over IP and Bluetooth could interact over AllJoyn.

You can find out more about AllJoyn here; you can’t find out more about any real-world cell-style proximal network, since, as far as I could tell, there isn’t one: it’s only an idea at present.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Sep 21, 2023
Wireless communication in workplace wearables protects and boosts the occupational safety and productivity of industrial workers and front-line teams....
Sep 21, 2023
Labforge is a Waterloo, Ontario-based company that designs, builds, and manufactures smart cameras used in industrial automation and defense applications. By bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into their vision systems with Cadence , they can automate tasks that are diffic...
Sep 21, 2023
At Qualcomm AI Research, we are working on applications of generative modelling to embodied AI and robotics, in order to enable more capabilities in robotics....
Sep 21, 2023
Not knowing all the stuff I don't know didn't come easy. I've had to read a lot of books to get where I am....
Sep 21, 2023
See how we're accelerating the multi-die system chip design flow with partner Samsung Foundry, making it easier to meet PPA and time-to-market goals.The post Samsung Foundry and Synopsys Accelerate Multi-Die System Design appeared first on Chip Design....

featured video

TDK PowerHap Piezo Actuators for Ideal Haptic Feedback

Sponsored by TDK

The PowerHap product line features high acceleration and large forces in a very compact design, coupled with a short response time. TDK’s piezo actuators also offers good sensing functionality by using the inverse piezo effect. Typical applications for the include automotive displays, smartphones and tablet.

Click here for more information about PowerHap Piezo Actuators

featured paper

Accelerating Monte Carlo Simulations for Faster Statistical Variation Analysis, Debugging, and Signoff of Circuit Functionality

Sponsored by Cadence Design Systems

Predicting the probability of failed ICs has become difficult with aggressive process scaling and large-volume manufacturing. Learn how key EDA simulator technologies and methodologies enable fast (minimum number of simulations) and accurate high-sigma analysis.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Automated Benchmark Tuning
Sponsored by Synopsys
Benchmarking is a great way to measure the performance of computing resources, but benchmark tuning can be a very complicated problem to solve. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Nozar Nozarian from Synopsys and Amelia Dalton investigate Synopsys’ Optimizer Studio that combines an evolution search algorithm with a powerful user interface that can help you quickly setup and run benchmarking experiments with much less effort and time than ever before.
Jan 26, 2023
29,455 views