Peer-to-peer network-based location on the mobile phone in the mid-term?

According to an article in the MIT Technology Review yesterday, Intel Research is working on a peer-to-peer protocol for exchanging data between handsets. There is already something called Bluetooth that could do this, but people are loathe to switch them on, although if this is something offered at the platform OS level, this could be very interesting.

My take on this: this could help devices position each other with greater accuracy and possibly transition to a more amorphous location-capture mechanism. As opposed to every single mobile device querying the mobile network/GPS satellites etc as they do now, you could have certain numbers of handsets pulling the data down and then broadcasting it to others in the vicinity. The broadcaster handset would perform triangulation on the fly at the ground-level, based on mobile phone density in the area. This could be sensed by measuring the ambient mobile phone signal strength in the area, or could be network-triggered.

Once the broadcast is finished, the mobile device would be released. The setup would be essentially similar to the DHT model used by the (much maligned) peer-to-peer network clients such as BitTorrent, Vuze, MuTorrent and others, where downloaders are much more frequent than uploaders. In this setup, every client is both a recipient of data, and a source of received data. The more clients are around, the faster the downloads. And you can switch it off at anytime, which apparently most people tend to do when they're done on the PC. If it was an OS feature, this would be more optimal as people would forget / have difficulty turning it off. Granted, this setup would probably work best in high-density urban areas with high mobile phone penetration rates.

An important element to this software feature would be anonymised & encoded handshakes so that although the data remains on the client, device-to-device anonymity would be preserved if hackers compromised a device to spread spam. Again, this is an issue that has already been looked at and taken care of to some degree with online peer-to-peer networks, provided tunnelling and other security features has been switched on.

This is mid- to long-term research here, but another example where the convergence of mobile and PC is allowing the porting of common software on the PC to better the mobile experience.

This may also help kickstart DARPA's attempts at building an interplanetary internet infrastructure to guide the numerous satellites and probes we have floating around in space right now, that are all guided by earth-centric - read centralised - communications. This is less than optimal as there is no failover mechanism, and an operational risk in case of temporary failure of data transmission from earth or "accidental" jamming from competing / unfriendly probes. DARPA's emerging DTN protocol, that I wrote about on my blog 6 months ago, may benefit from working with these groups as opposed to living in a box with the federal slushfund and creating stuff that is strictly limited to military applications.