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An Introduction To Wireless USB (WUSB)
An anonymous reader writes "This technical whitepaper by Rafael Kolic, a technology marketing manager in Intel's Corporate Technology Group, introduces Wireless USB (WUSB) and explains how it will impact device performance and mobility. The latest iteration of USB technology, WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling."
Ummm.. don't we already have something for that called Bluetooth? Hrm.
From the Bluetooth SIG Mission Statement:
Develop, publish and promote the preferred short-range wireless specification for connecting mobile products...
Well, now that Bluetooth is dead, it's good that WUSB will come out soon. That way Netcraft can confirm that WUSB is dying.
They have to do something all day there...
Or the security.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So soon after the "Bluetooth is Dying" article we get this.
:)
Methinks a conspiracy!
In all honesty, this looks like quite nice tech though I can imagine some of the implementation will be a real pill. Problems like how to manage roaming a device from one cluster to the next will surely require some ingenuity, especially given that backwards compatibility with classic USB devices is a goal (though I presume that those will only be adjuncts to the cluster, sitting at a wirelesswired bridge).
Bluetooth has fulfilled quite well the idea of a truly ad-hoc network among devices, but I assume that will be a much more difficult thing to achieve with WUSB, making some, I'm sure, doubt the point of the project. I think the idea of devices beaming data around to each other at 480 mbits answers that one quite nicely. I look forward to this*
*linux and OS X support for this; until then, I ain't touchin' it
Will this have longer range than Bluetooth? If so, it will fly, especially if some sort of OS-transparent USB-WUSB adapter is available. If not, I doubt there's much sure for it. What about security? Will it be encrypted at all? Last thing I need is to be using a WUSB mouse on a plane and having some kid three rows back taking over and h4x0r1n6 my b0x3n.
You are not the customer.
I really enjoy being able to power most of my devices over USB and not having to have an extra plug and/or wallwart to deal with. I for one would much rather keep wired usb and forgo the power adapter, than wireless usb and have to deal with yet another plug to have to find power for. I know most of you probably are already running fire hazards as it is now.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure. The thought of someone with a nice high-gain cantenna and a datalogger is none to comforting.
I can also see all many nasty opportunities for system flakyness when a computer gets intermitt-tt-ttant contacts with other wireless USB devices and tries to establish a connection.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One of the biggest advantages of USB is the power that flows through it. I just plug in my mouse, webcam etc and no bulky adapters required. Theyve also been around since the days of the Pentium1, and you can be sure a USB drive will work many places.
Now wireless.... you'll need batteries or adapters, wont work just everywhere and you'll have to pay motherboard makers to build it in.
Not too many people need short-range wireless interfaces outside of the 802.11a/b/g, which is different
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
All of the problems that immediately came to mind, fell under the unsurprisingly vague section Design Considerations.
And none of them seem solved...
Hell, did it even mention what spectrum was being targetted?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
And now if we could just develop wireless power for all these wireless devices... other than batteries, of course. ;-)
a problem.
What?
because USA failed
"WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling" - I moderate this line redunant - I mean really, if it had cables, then it wouldn't be wireless
Speed? 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 equivalent)
Security? unknown (better be good)
Power requirements?100-300 mW
Range? 10 meters
Cost? unknown
Number of Devices? 127
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Here are some highlights for those too lazy to skim the article (or in case it gets Slashdotted)...
the JoshMeister on Security
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
which one will the FPS gamer want?
:)
Bluetooth mouse, WUSB mouse, or standard wireless mouse??
They'll want a standard wired mouse, thank you very much. All others risk downtime for battery changes.
Will this have a standard way for wireless headsets to connect to phones and wireless headphones to connect to audio equipment?
If not, bluetooth is needed as well.
probably the standard wireless mouse. USB in it's own right eats up CPU power, which in turn, eats fps. WUSB probably won't be different. The usage for USB mice wouldn't be much, but any extreme gamer might take it as too much =(
Not to mention any lag factors with wireless.
Wait a second. Has anybody figured out why we need batteries for our wireless keyboards and mice? Is it a conspiracy? I mean, seriously. You can't convince me that wireless mice -- which use all of 1 AA battery that lasts for, well, months I imagine.. couldn't be powered by some kind of capacity setup and a wheel that generated power from the mouse ball. Of course, this is different with optical mice, but there's no reason there couldn't be some kind of ball for generating power, and then optical sensors for the tracking, so as to avoid the traditional problem with conventional mice where the pickups get dirty..
And keyboards? Give me a break! Don't tell me there isn't enough energy coming from my typing, to transmit that information to my computer...
Has anybody worked on this?
I want my patent.
- reid
"The laptop is connected wirelessly to the radio tower via a serial connection
A wireless serial cable, eh?
got sig?
People get so caught up in the wireless craze..
But unless it's a PDA, keyboard, or mouse, it's not going to be wireless, you'll have to plug it into the wall for power. Unless of course, you like buying lots and lots of batteries. Rechargable you say? Find a wireless battery charger and I'll retract.
So, you still have to cable the power cord. I mean, I'm not really saying this wireless stuff is bad, it's not. You can plug in your printer across the room and not have to run the USB/LPT cable.
I guess you have to take the name "wireless" literally, it's not "wirenone" it's just LESS wires.
If this becomes a common standard, however, it would be nice being able to buy *any* wireless USB mouse and not worry about what brand reciever you have. Although, this really isn't a huge issue.. Logitech wireless KB/Mouse stuff is cheap anyways.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Bluetooth is dead, remember?
By the time this ships maybe the mouse pad will be a power pad.
Not many at Best Buy, However at UPS (as in United Parcel Service) they recently bought scanners using Bluetooth to connect a base station attached to workers by a belt, with a scanner strapped to their hands. The result is soemthing very Sci-Fi'ish and actually quite useful (you can walk the scanner portion long distances away from the base portion and it will still function as intended -- using bluetooth)
I'm certain other large firms have things like this using bluetooth. While I have no personal use for bluetooth, and prefer wired devices anyhow, there are undoubtedly many companies using it to solve tricky issues.
Though since bluetooth is dead I guess nobody will be using it anymore.
it's all about drivers. From a software point of view, it'll look like USB. That might not sound like a big deal, but believe me, if you develop USB devices, it matters a lot
I don't think this is a bad idea. Think of all the money saved in batteries and/or chargers. I wouldn't mind winding them up, as long as they generated power quietly and my mouse doesn't shoot across the room after I let go like my old Evil Knievel stunt cycle.
FireWireless
Should it be called Firewireless or just Fire?
Also, it ensures an old PC is forward compatible with new WUSB peripherals, as you can get a WUSB hub for wired USB. No new motherboard/PCI cards required.
For instance, you could put a WUSB hub on each floor of your house. Now your WUSB webcam can be moved around the whole house streaming video to your PC. That's pretty cool.
Is it just me or is anyone else in a perpetual state of battery hell? I'm looking at the devices on my desk right now that I use throught my day -- PDA, Graphing Calculator, Cell Phone, Digital Camera, and two MP3 players (one solid state for jogging, one HD based one for trips).
Between all these things I'm drowning in power transformers, docking stations, and battery chargers! I feel like a fleet manager, its practically a full time job making sure everything has power.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It doesn't make sense to "kill" bluetooth. The standard is there, although broken in some respects. Plenty of devices have started to use it. For it's purpose of low power use and simple connectivity, it has things going for it. Bluetooth's only real issue has been cost. When I can buy a bluetooth card for $220 or a lan card for $99, which do you think someone will invest in? However, consider the issue of the exploding WAN market. Everyone's battling over who makes 801.11b, g, and whatever new variant that comes along (dual channel, etc.) The single greatest problem with WAN is that you've got the idea of connectivity, but not the bandwidth or the standard for device connection for high bitrate media. I can buy a Wi-Fi DVD/Dixv/MP3 player, but I have to have the company's specific software to use it and I have to have the local network configured correctly. What would happen if you started with USB and added in your own wireless spec? You start with a device model that everyone has already agreed on and can instantly support plug-and-play device detection. They can by-pass the politics of getting an agreed upon standard networking protocal since it is not trying to tie into ethernet. They can just create a virtual networking device driver and route it over USB and we have 480 Mb wireless networking. Intel could easily become the dead center of media-centric, wireless conectivity.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Competition between standards makes a lot less sense. With Betamax vs. VHS a lot of people, consumers and manufacturers, wasted a lot of time investing in and supporting the wrong one. (DVD writing is a similar, which was saved in part by the shared form factor). This could easily happen here, though I personally think Bluetooth and WUSB are very different (different topologies, for one thing).
You do have a point though. Some protocols/standards are just better, and there should be competition between groups to get their standard accepted. But this should happen before large-scale adoption of one or the other, to minimise 'damage' to the early adopters. At the moment it looks like Intel is jumping the gun, because its standard is not ratified by the IEEE (the relevant standards agency). Better for everyone if an open standard is agreed by everyone before devices are put on the shelf. Sadly, this doesn't always happen.
Are they just going to tack some new capability onto USB every time there's a superior competing technology?
USB was fine for what it was originally designed for. Then Intel had to juice it up a little bit to try to convince people it was better than FireWire. Now they've got Bluetooth in their sights.
I would much rather have several different technologies that each do one or two things exceptionally well, rather than one technology that's trying to be all things to all people.
Microsoft is trying to shoehorn Windows into everything, and look what we've got to show for it: PDAs that need more horsepower than a workstation from five years ago had, BMWs that develop a mind of their own, an albatross of a game console, etc...
It's like Intel is slapping a wig and fake tits on some big, burly truck driver and trying to convice people it's just as good or better than a real woman.
so what are we looking at here? wifi without the tcp/ip layer? cant they just use wifi and hotwire the usb protocol on top?
if this is going into the cellphone then forget it, its shooting birds with warship guns time. i dont have anything on my cellphone that needs that kind of transfer speed. maybe those pda/cellphone hybrids need them but they allready have wifi.
so end of story is, bluetooth for address book, wifi for files.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You're missing the point. USB should never have happened either. Firewire already existed, was better, faster, and UBS didn't address anything that firewire didn't do at least as well. (And for many things, Ethernet might have been a better choice than USB too). But we got USB shoved down our throats. Of course, many of use still needed firewire adapters, and the USB built into my expensive notebook is pretty much worthless since it's USB 1.1 (too slow to talk to many devices like external hard drives or DVD/CD writers at a reasonable speed). No one but Microsoft and Intel wanted USB 1.1, but we got it. No reasonable person wants wireless USB (bluetooth and the 802.11x protocols each do better in their own areas and we certainly don't need WUSB interfearing with them), but you're going to get it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Doesn't this lose the main advantages of USB: Devices drawing power from the bus, and high speed? Give me Bluetooth over this anyday.
These, of course, being things that Bluetooth brings to the table...
WUSB does actually bring high speed with it, whereas Bluetooth, as far as I know, is relatively low speed. WUSB's target is 480MBit, which is pretty fast for wireless.
And I'd like to hear your suggestions for getting wireless power.
It'll probably be just like the original USB spec - the distance had to be less than 2m to work.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
Someone (Toshiba? Micron?) was working on a power-generating notebook keyboard a couple of years back. I'm not sure if it ever resulted in a product. Each key had a little coil that generated a tiny current over its travel. It wasn't supposed to be enough to actually power the computer, just lengthen battery life, but might be enough for a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Depending on the type of work, and the typist I suppose. ;)
For the mouse, your best bet would probably be a flywheel or gyro type arrangement similar to a self-winding watch. Kind of like one of those cool gyro-sensing mice in reverse.
There are other sources of energy available, of course, like heat from human hands, ambient light, etc. Anyone can come up with something that barely works for a patent application; making it cheap enough to be ubiquitous is the tricky bit.
Interesting idea,
One problem might be that in order to drive an inductor or other type of charging mechanism you would necessarily need some friction from the mouse ball, the more friction, the more power generated.
I'm not sure how much friction a user would put up with using the mouse, certainly gamers would have none of it.
Looking over the other posts there was some concern about security. But the thing that I saw that made me bulk was the idea of WUSB hard drive. The problem I see is what happens if you turn off your computer, and your WUSB hard drive is on? Does that mean that some punk can then access your hard drive? Some things should be left with the security of a wire. I am all for innovation, but this is one area that I can see problems. Brings wardriving to a whole new dimension. Forget trying to hack the computer, just hack the hard drive. A hackers dream. And the whole idea of security being implemented on the software level -- something tells me that it means that WUSB may not be open source friendly. What vendor is going to want to release open source drivers for something that they most likely half-aced? Somehow I see a problem akin to the WiFi drivers -- few selection for those of us that want to use open source and use WiFi. A nice idea, but I nessarily like the idea of having my printer hijacked because some smuck walks by with a laptop.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
A supply of power to the device.
No, seriously, one of the advantages USB is supposed to deliver is that it has a 5v supply that can deliver power to devices so they don't need a power adaptor any more. Sometimes it even works, too - I have an unpowered USB doohickey that I plug my camera media into, for example. Do that with WUSB :-)
How about a coil in the mouse, and magnets in the mousepad? Fits in pretty well with the optical no-moving-parts philosophy and it generates the electricity pretty directly (straight out the coil). I think you might also need a capacitor to hold a reserve so you can get instant response whenever you start moving the mouse.
If nobody's already patented this... well, I call prior art!
Let me summarize why Bluetooth is not dead, and wireless USB is not really a competitor for bluetooth:
Wireless USB Power requirements: 300 mw ("with a target of 100 over time")
Bluetooth power requirements: 100 mW, 2.5 mW, 1 mW (the last two are class 2 and 3, the variants widely used.)
Frankly, wireless USB sounds less interesting to me. Well, it's a threat to Wifi, from the sound of it. It's really, really fast and power hungry. It sounds primarily for unwiring our desk-bound, non-mobile computer peripherals from the computer. But then we will have to plug them all into the wall instead. So there are a few that had power anyway and now we've cut the number of cables from 2 to 1 - OK. But quite a few the only cable was USB (and that was providing power) anyway. It wouldn't be a viable solution for things like wireless mouses and keyboards, for instance. And I don't think I'd want that instead of bluetooth for the PDA/phone or PDA/computer link.
There are a lot of applications where very low power (1 mw!) is much more important than bandwidth.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
No; when it comes to infrastructure, standards are a good thing. You can complain about monocultures all you want, but for infrastructure -- a category I am using to describe things like the language you speak, the voltage coming to your house, the broadcast standard encoding your TV signal -- uniformity is good.
New wireless standards should be introduced because they provide added functionality and can be reasonably expected to eventually replace the old standard; not just for diversity of choice.
With all that said, I think bluetooth's drivers are so miserable and its range/speed/power consumption such a poor choice that I'm ready to send it to the scrap heap. A zigbee/wifi breakdown seems like a much better solution to me than a compromise wireless standard that's not only slow and short range, but uses too much power to be left on all the time on mobile devices.
RS232 is simple as you say although the spec is bigger than two pages.
The Bluetooth specs include shared access to a noisy medium, so theres a lot of pages to the specification just to get that working. Want to see how many pages of specs relating to the various networks there are? Including the actual media, the signal as well as the bottom layer protocols?
Bluetooth also includes a lot of bluetooth profiles. This are roughly equivalent to the HTTP, SMTP, IMAP etc specs as used for internet services. You want to see how many of those can fit on two pages?
The only reason bluetoth has innovation happening at the edges is because the in-between is the ether.
You want something as simple as 2 pages and a bit of soldering? How about morse code and AM modulation, cos thats all you'll get.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
In fact, a lot of the security inherent in wired USB is tied to its inconvenience. Effective security requires that you "introduce" the two devices (the computer and the peripheral) to one another such that there's no ambiguity. If the two float out of range and float back in again, they have to pick each other up correctly.
With wired USB, it's clear how you switch a peripheral from one computer to another: I either switch the cables back and forth or plug in to a USB switch. What would a wireless USB switch look like? You can't automatically glom onto whichever device is closest, especially if you're in the middle of something like disk defragmentation or burning a CD.
None of these problems are unsolvable, but the solutions won't yield a wireless USB technology that's a transparent replacement for wired USB.
Sorry, Intel, but wireless is different.