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Wireless Networking Research at Berkeley

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the picoradio dept.

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."

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. The US Military already knows by jpmorgan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. As a current student of Rabaey... by gimlix2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!