Choke Free Roads in England via engaged and networked communication

Peer-to-peer network invites drivers to get connected: CarTorrent could smarten up our daily commute, reducing accidents and bringing multimedia journey data to our fingertips

As my good friends know I travel everywhere When I am not flying on my Honda Fireblade. In fact I made it into MotorCycle News last week as I have done nearly 100,000 miles on this bike in 4 years.

The 100,000 mile Blade.

Why because England sucks at traffic - too much of it. I ride to Preston from the SMLXL base in Cambridge a 200 mile ride in 2.5 hours or thereabouts depending on traffic cops and speed cameras, ahem. Whereas in a car it could be a 4+ hour journey.

So joy to the world - we now have CarTorrent

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles are working on a wireless communication network that will allow cars to talk to each other, simultaneously downloading information in the shape of road safety warnings, entertainment content and navigational tools.

The UCLA Engineering's Network Research Lab team, led by Mario Gerla and Giovanni Pau, hit upon the idea in 2004, when peer-to-peer networking took off fuelled by applications such as BitTorrent. "We had the idea from BitTorrent, and decided to extend BitTorrent to cars under the name of CarTorrent. One of our dreams had always been to apply the technology to civilian applications"

And

Gerla and his team instead propose to connect cars to one another using the wireless networking platform they're developing, which could be up and running by as early as 2012.

The wireless network would allow moving vehicles within 100 metres and 300 metres of each other to connect and create a network with a wide range. The network would then allow drivers to download information from internet access points simply by driving by, and then share that information with other cars on the road.

Gerla says the benefits of such a network are numerous: "There will be immediate benefits in driving safety as well as in content distribution. Car-to-car communications can be used to avoid accidents by alerting the drivers of imminent danger. To prevent a crash we must act in fractions of a second. We are currently collaborating with vehicle manufacturers to help reduce accidents and fatalities on the road. For this latter application, vehicles are equipped with sensing devices, such as radars and video cameras.

Networks People and Machines

I love riding my Fireblade, but I would also like the idea that our roads were a little less congested and a little safer. lets hope 2012 comes quickly