Nokia have developed a mobile filesharing network which may soon allow people to share music files, pictures, games etc. just like the Internet's main P2P networks. Lorant Farkas and colleagues, at the Nokia Research Center in Budapest, Hungary have tested P2P network on a model of their 6600 mobile phones. Computers on a P2P network act as clients and servers, relaying data between connections, removing the need for any centralized server. P2P networks online allow users to search each others shared directories for files and then download them straight from that user.
The network developed by Farkas can currently be used to share pictures and text, "We were primarily thinking of this kind of content", he said. Future versions should go further; sharing content like digital music is a priority. The system works on phones that connect to GPRS networks, which were designed to make it cheap to stay online. The team faced several challenges in the development, as mobile phones have to rely for now on limited battery power and haven't got as much processing power as a computer. The researchers tried several schemes for communicating between users and clusters to see which would work the best for the network. They found a complex structure known as "deterministic ring" to be ideal, blending fast searching with network resilience.
However, while this new development seems promising, it's understandable that it will receive pressure and eventually legal troubles from the entertainment industry, which is currently fighting P2P networks on the Internet in an attempt to slow down copyright infringement.
Source:
New Scientist
However, while this new development seems promising, it's understandable that it will receive pressure and eventually legal troubles from the entertainment industry, which is currently fighting P2P networks on the Internet in an attempt to slow down copyright infringement.
Source:
New Scientist
