Nice use case, Fred. Hope you got one of those sensors for your
own underbrushes. I am sure though, that if this is deployed by a
government agency, everything has unique identities, just for keeping
the bureaucracy happy with inventory maintenance and re-supply processes.
Would be nice though if the concept of anonymous identy was better
embodies in the IETF architecture.
Cheers
Toerless
On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 01:36:42AM +0000, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
On Nov 1, 2013, at 3:34 PM, Larry Masinter <masinter(_at_)adobe(_dot_)com>
wrote:
it might be a good thing if we were to first identify what needs to be
identified.
"Everything" needs to be identified.
I'm not sure I buy that.
Let me give you an example. Deborah Estrin did some research a number of
years ago with the California Division of Forestry, USC/ISI (which is where
she was at the time), and UCSB on the use of a randomly distributed sensor
network in managing wildfires. The premise was that an airplane might pitch
out styrofoam "golf balls" that contained, each, a watch battery, a cheap
GPS, a silicon radio that might be able to reach a few hundred meters, and
silicon pretty comparable to the inside of a wristwatch. The device, when it
landed, would figure out where it was to a level of accuracy on the order of
tens of meters and then turn off the GPS. After that, it would periodically
wake up, hear statements from its neighbors, and then make a statement. The
statement would be of the form "I am located <here>, and I can hear {<list of
locations>}." The statement might also include zero or more statements of the
form "location <there> is reportedly [no longer] speaking."
In the nature of the case, if the fire ate up a sensor, it would stop
commenting, and the fact of its doing so would rattle around the network
until it got to someone that cared, such as an application on a PC. But it is
not reported as "Larry's favorite golfball isn't speaking". It's "GPS
Location XX/YY isn't speaking".
In this context, the locations need to be identified, but not the golf balls
(nobody speaks TO them, so they don't need an address).