In the future, people may become telephone network nodes.

Deploying a mobile infrastructure is not easy, is quite expensive, often meets with public resistance, but it is a necessary step to increase network coverage. Therefore, developers of mobile communication systems are considering alternatives, including a proposal on which members of the network could become carriers of its portable nodes.

The study, which is being conducted at Royal University in Belfast, examines the use of special wearable sensors by the public. The sensors will interact with each other, which will significantly reduce energy consumption compared to traditional antennas, provide greater coverage and the ability to adapt to the number of requests from end devices.

The system works extremely simply. Instead of producing hundreds and thousands of separate connections between different devices and a telephone tower, each network participant sends a signal to someone who is near, from which the signal is redirected to the next person, and so on, until it reaches its destination.

Body-to-body networks or BBN (Body to Body Networks) can be organized using existing devices, such as your mobile phone, so you will not need to install additional equipment. One of the significant advantages of such networks could be the fact that large crowds of people could increase the network coverage in a given area, rather than reduce it, making the call from this point difficult to reach.
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“If the idea gets a move, BBNs can also lead to a reduction in the number of base stations needed to serve mobile phone users, especially in areas with high population density,” said one of the researchers at Royal University. “Such a system could help society to perceive the adverse health effects associated with the use of existing networks, as well as make mobile networks more environmentally friendly due to the significantly lower capacity required for operation.”

Although such networks are still in their infancy today, Cotton believes that they could reach more than 400 million devices worldwide by 2014.

via Wired