MOBILE armies need mobile communications. Those communications,though, must be secure—and not just from eavesdropping. They also need to be uninterruptible. And that is a problem. Many mobile networks (consider Wi-Fi routers or mobile-phone towers) operate via hubs. Destroy the hub and you destroy the network. Even a peer-to-peer system in which messages travel in a series of hops between nodes (in the form of the devices that comprise the system) rather than via a hub, and can be degraded by a loss of nodes. Existing versions of such systems,which are usually static, rather than mobile, or require each node to be set up individually,in advance, to talk to specific other nodes. Mobility brings a need for fixed reconfiguration.
In theory such a system is possible. It is called MANET, or an approximate acronym for mobile ad-hoc network. In practice,though, a workable MANET has proved impossible to design—until now.
The main problem is mathematical. To avoid the pre-programming required by...
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Source: economist.com