14 DAY TRIAL // A group of researchers announces the development of a new idea about how future networks should be organized. The team moves past the model of a relatively stable network such as the Internet, and considered how networks made of modern mobile devices need to be set up in order to survive.
The growing proportion of portable, network-enabled portable devices on the market is already beginning to produce effects, as evidenced for example by the simple fact that more and more website are beginning to open dedicated mobile-oriented pages.
But the use of such devices is also changing the very nature of the communications networks themselves, the group behind the new work acknowledges.
One of the most important things that will change is the fact that portable devices will be added and removed from their respective networks very often, which is something that would pose great problems to a conventional network.
But a paper published in the December issue of the esteemed journal Distributed Computing shows that this will not be the cause with portable devices. The team behind the study included expert Nancy Lynch.
She holds an appointment as the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge.
The group's main proposal is outfitting mobile device networks that are unstable by nature with stable, shared memory, in a long-term endeavor. Work on the idea has been going on at MIT since 2001.
Officials at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) saw the reasoning behind the new work, and became the main sponsors of the research effort. At first, the work was inspired by a military proposal.
The goal of that project was to develop a way of enabling teams of soldiers operating in hostile environments to preserve and maintain vital information safe, and out of the reach of the enemy.
At this point, scientists say that the basic concepts behing their efforts could be applied to sensor networks, networks of mobile devices, peer-to-peer services on the Internet, and the large server farms that host heavily trafficked websites as well.
The system is called Reconfigurable Atomic Memory for Basic Objects (RAMBO), a reminiscence of its military-oriented application and origin.
“It’s supposed to look like an instantaneously accessible memory, like if you have one machine in one location,” Lynch explains.
“We wanted to have that same appearance, but really, it’s running on mobile devices out in the field. There is no one machine,” she adds.
The expert concludes by saying that one of the main traits RAMBO has is its ability to send multiple copies of the same information package to other devices on the network other than the recipient, thus backing the data up.