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Wireless Networking Research at Berkeley
zootallure writes "An interesting article about a self-configuring, wireless networking project going on at Berkeley's Wireless Research Center. Apparently, these Berkeley guys are convinced that they're going to leave Bluetooth and 802.11 in the dust."
I saw Jan Rabaey's talk at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC, the hardest of hardcore circuit conferences). The research is bold and fairly interesting. The slides from the presentation are worth the read. The research might not pan out, but it's definitely worth a shot.
You can find more technical info about his research on the PicoRadio page.
They're called ad-hoc wireless networks and the military is fully aware of their potential - both systems for maintaining reliable communications on a rapidly changing battlefield, and also the potential to drop thousands of small sensors from planes, etc... They first started looking into them in the early '70s, just after the development of the first wired packet-switching networks.
In 1972 DARPA (the same people that brought you ARPANet, which later grew into the Internet as we know it) created a research project into a packet radio network, a.k.a. PRNet. They didn't get it working until around 1980, but in the end it did work, and was pretty fast too.
The research was eventualy taken by the Army, Navy and Air Force who all started working on ad-hoc wireless networks tailored for their particular needs (for example, while the Army is mostly interested in fairly short-range applications, which this would be useful for, the Navy and Air Force are interested in algorithms to create reliable connectivity between ships, aircraft and ground stations that are below the horizon from each other through networks of satellites and aircraft).
Current US military implementations of ad-hoc wireless networks that I'm aware of are the US Army TF XXI's Tactical Internet, the US Navy's ELB (Extending the Littoral Battlespace) ACTD (Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration) and DARPA's GloMo (Global Mobile) Information Systems program. These are all, for the most part, a bit more high-powered and high-speed than the system these guys are working on.
In the public world, the IETF MANET working group are also trying to create a standard for ad-hoc wireless networking, but like the military implementations these are also a bit higher-end than picoradio. But if you're looking for something to wipe the floor with IEEE 802.11, IETF MANET is what to watch - but be prepared to wait a little while.
So this is just a very low-powered ad hoc wireless network, then. *yawn*
They're talking about creating them to power themselves from their environment, and give examples of generating power from vibrations, or from small solar cells... which makes me wonder whether it would be possible to create picoreadio devices which power themselves from the ambient radiowaves. I know some British scientist built a radio which is entirely self-powered in this way, and it seems to me to be a great way of powering things like these (if their power requirement is low enough). Anyway...
For those who don't know, an ad hoc wireless network is a wireless network like IEEE 802.11, but entirely self configurating, etc... etc... They're pretty neat things, but there aren't any real implementations outside of the US military, so these guys will really have a first if they get picoradio done soon. They're based on such great acronym^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprotocols such as ZRP (Zone Routing Procol) or DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector) and DSR (Dynamic Source Routing).
There is currently an IETF working group (MANET) trying to develop some standards, but there's a lot of research to be done first, so it could be a while before you see anything. Once they do put something out in a few years time, it'll kick IEEE 802.11's ass. =)
If you want more info on adhoc networks, you can look at MANET's 'official' webpage here. That page is pretty useless though, so you should look at their unofficial website here. It has links to a lot of great resources.
Ad hoc wireless networks are cool.
According to Rabaey, each node in the picoradio network will draw no more than 100 microwatts of power, three orders of magnitude less than 802.11b's 300 milliwatts. The benefits of such a low power network are obvious: no batteries are needed because each node can harvest all the energy it needs from its environment.
As a current student in Professor Rabaey's classes, I can say that his ideas are pretty damn cool when he explains it in his own way.
Sure, it's neat that his nodes will need no energy because it "harvests" energy from it's environment.
Development is actually going on so that the "harvesting" actually comes from the natural vibration of a wall! [site: dailycal.org]
So what do you get, a bunch of folks each developing their own thing:
nodes the size of a button that you just stick on the wall and it just works.
Pin-and-Play anyone?
(infomercial voice)Set it and forget it!
There are many other research programs, both academic and industrial, on wireless ad hoc networks, going back at least to the 1978 DARPA-sponsored Distributed Sensor Nets Workshop at Carnegie-Mellon University. Most of the work has been funded by DARPA, by the low-power wireless integrated microsensors (LWIM) project of the mid-1990s and now by the SensIT project. (Their projects page lists more than 25 academic research programs on these networks, complete with links.)
The University of California at Los Angeles, often working in collaboration with the Rockwell Science Center, has had a Wireless Integrated Network Sensors (WINS) project since 1993. UCLA also supports the similar-but-different "Smart Dust" program, which also employs ultra-low-power networking, but uses optical communication between network nodes.
Professor Anantha Chandrakasan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the Principal Investigator of the uAMPS (microAMPS) project.
On the commercial side, these networks are being developed by Ember, graviton, Wherenet, and Motorola, just to name a few.
The ZigBee industry consortium is the marketing and compliance arm of the IEEE 802.15.4 draft standard, in a relationship similar to that between WECA (with the "Wi-Fi" brand) and IEEE 802.11b. This draft standard for ultra-low-power, ultra-low-cost wireless networking, now under development, should be finished this winter.
It's not actually paranoia, the satellite radio folks are trying to keep part 15 devices from interfering with their equipment. Right now they can shut down a part 15 (i.e. ISM / 802.11) system even if it is complying with out of band emmissions specifications. By tightening the out-of-band specifications, they put the responsiblity on the equipment manufacturer and not the end user.
If anyone is paranoid, it's the 802.11 people. They're predicting the end of wireless ISPs and most don't have a clue what this is about.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .