The Military Aims to Develop 'Smart' & Secure WiFi

Krishna Dagli writes to mention a Network World article about a military project to create a self-configuring, secure wireless network. From the article: "Academic concepts such as artificial intelligence and Tim Berners-Lee's 'Semantic Web,' combined with technologies such as the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), cognitive radio, and peer-to-peer networking, would provide the nuts and bolts of such a network. Although the project is intended for soldiers in the field, the resulting advances could trickle down to end users. 'Military networks are going to converge as closely as we can to civil technologies,' says Preston Marshall, the program manager of DARPA's Advanced Technology Office."

Comments

Oblig Groucho Marx Quote

[Andrew Nagy]

"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."

Just think what they could do with WiFi.

Re:Oblig Groucho Marx Quote

[remembertomorrow]

"But who'd suspect,
A military intelligence.
Two words combined that can't make sense."

Megadeth - Hangar 18

Re:Ah, yes.

[blackcoot]

in theory, this is precisely what the cognitive radio (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio) would fix. assuming you've got a sufficiently wide spectrum that it can't all be jammed at once, the radio will detect which portions of the spectrum are being jammed and transmit in clear bands. of course, that's all in theory. in practice, who knows?

Omninet

[richie2000]

Idea: Use this, or a similar technology together with IPv6 to build a omnipresent network for everything. Ditch all the old crap - TV over cable, FM radio, POTS, GSM - everything.

Use this network, which essentially configures and extends itself where needed, as needed, to deliver HDTV, phone and Internet over IP. Wired, wireless or satellite - the network should be smart enough to use whatever means it has, but dumb enough to not care about what kind of traffic it routes, just that it does as good a job as possible with the available hardware. Automatically multi-link, it would route most of your p2p traffic through fibers while your VoIP goes wireless to your headset. Built-in authentication and encryption to keep your gadgets in touch and your data secure, even though you use someone elses hardware as well as let other use yours.

It's mesh networking, FON, cellphones, multicast and wimax, all the hype rolled into one big network. And no, we shall not call it Skynet.