WiMax and the Death of MANET’s
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 11 October 2006There has been a lot of news about the rollout of WiMax. Sprint has already stated that it will roll out national access in 2008. Nortel claims that it has a WiMax router capable of consumer broadband speeds. While WiMax has been well recieved by businesses, they have mostly ignored MANET’s. To them WiMax is simply a better wireless data network than current 3G networks. Researchers have gone the other way almost ignoring WiMax and spending a lot of time studying ad-hoc networks. To us MANET’s provide lots of interesting and tough problems. All of this makes me question the hope of work (my own included) in the field of MANET’s and VANET’s.
WiMax has many desirable capabilities: 30 mile coverage per base station, high transfer rates, and the ability to hold a connection when the reciever is traveling at highway speeds. Compare that with ad-hoc networks that have significant limitations. Some researchers believe there is an ad-hoc horizon. Past some number of hops ad-hoc networks don’t seem to perform well. That group put the horizon at just 3 hops! There are some legal questions with borrowing bandwidth from open base stations. However some groups have gone as far as breaking the law to develop ad-hoc networks. Ad-hoc networks also have many of the trust issues associated with P2P networks.
Ad-Hoc networks do have the advantage of working in situations where no infrastructure exists, such as in military, emergency response, or space exploration settings. Outside of this limited set of circumstances I doubt that MANET’s with no guarantee of quality of service will be used. WiMax just seems so simple and effective that it will be the network of choice for most consumer products.
Can anybody tell me a good reason why I am wrong about this?
Ebiquity Blog
October 24th, 2008 at 4:59 am
WiMAX has an enormously higher power consumption requirements (exceeding a factor of 10000 in some cases) in comparison to multi-hop. People tend to forget about it because they usually don’t care how much energy their service provider wastes, but this will become a major issue as the prices of energy go up and the costs of broadband to consumer go down. WiMAX is a long-term economically unsustainable technology.