[samstave]

I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions...

Which networking protocol best maps to this?

And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection...

I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campuses and report that back to the city...

And that's almost a decade old now...

So apply the same but report the data back to the traffic management system which is also trained on all the traffic patterns for a given intersection to best optimize for their patterns...

[hamiltonkibbe]

For the most part the MAC just looks for another signal on the wire (another train on the same section of rail) and when it looks clear, starts transmitting (driving). As you can imagine, there will be cases when 2 MACs start talking at the same time, at which point they detect the collision, wait a random delay and try again. I wouldn’t want to be on that train, I’d prefer plain old serial with hardware flow control

[fanf2]

Ethernet has not worked like that since the 1990s.

Even WiFi avoids relying on collision detection by routing client-to-client traffic via the AP instead of being peer-to-peer.

[rini17]

Large part of TCP is dealing with dropped packets. Presumably you don't want that to carry that over to rail/road traffic :)

[samstave]

HAHAH yes, I know -- I just didnt have a better example protocol... TCP is "ensuring the traffic gets there" -- not so much "ensuring no collisions" that was why I chose that one.

Maybe BGP instead? "Route failed - go this way instead, as a backup"

[rini17]

I'm pretty sure there's very active logistics R&D involved for decades already and they don't need any mansplaining about network protocols.

However if it were possible to develop completely new transportation system with autonomy considered from the planning stage, that might be more efficient. Musks' gadgets don't count, their capacity is laughable.