[e2e] Collaboration on Future Internet Architectures

[David P. Reed]

Lachlan Andrew wrote:
>
> True, but if we ignore noise that is independent between receivers, I
> doubt that  N  (and hence  S)  would be big enough to do much
> cooking-with-narrowband.  However, I don't have figures, and would be
> happy to be proved wrong :)
Depends on the system architecture.   Today's radio designs certainly 
have no ability to scale their power down as the density goes up.
>
> As an aside, it would be interesting to see if there are further
> physical limits imposed by the need to have super-cooled receivers
> near our hot transmitters; could the shielding intrinsically interfere
> with the radiation patters or something?  Maxwell's daemon comes to
> mind...
>
>
I completely agree that this is an intersting direction.   As a hobby, 
I've been wondering if the "reversible computing" or "conservative 
logic" concepts can be applied sensibly to communications.   The minimum 
energy needed to communicate one bit of information from one point in a 
thermodynamic system to another with perfect reliability would seem to 
be a simple thermodynamic problem to solve.  There is no obvious reason 
why spatial separation should be a bound...  Bennet/Landauer tell us 
what the minimum energy to destroy a bit of information during a 
computation must be, and suggest that that is the only essential energy 
that must be expended in a computation.   And there is a standard 
cionjecture/result from quantum gravity that suggests that the total 
amount of information within a bounded region of space is proportional 
to the surface area of that space (thus a fractal surface can enclose 
more information than a tight convex one).