Our environment interacts

The concept Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to idea that technologies, networks and computers surround people and interact with them. It’s like technologies being embedded in our environment like nature does and respond actively to changes around us and to our own requests. It requires the combination of different technologies: wireless, nanotechnology, biotechnology, sensors, etc.

Another topic related to this one is Human Computer Interaction: how are we going to communicate with machines in the near future? Are we going to accept the intrusive and invasive use of a different set of gadgets inside our everyday lives?

Music everywhere

How many times have you thought that the music that you have in your computer could be played in the Hi-Fi system in the living room? Or maybe in your car? Well that’s becoming each time more a reality: wireless standards that allow equipment to understand each other in a fast way will drive it.

This is the beginning of a current that we’re going to see boosting in the coming years: convergence and user’s customization. Imagine what a user wants from the technology and plan your design for it. Another field that comes into place in this case is domotics, think about a single interface in your house where you define all the parameters that control any single device. Do you fear that all the machines will talk inside your house?

Playing telecom games

Game theory has been widely used in very different subjects such as economics, politics, sociology, psychology, transportation, etc. It’s emplyed in situations where there is more than one player that has to take decisions interactively. Basically there are a limited number of players, a set of actions and an output function to be maximized for each player.

Game theory has induced a vast range of studies and some of them have tackled the communication systems. For example it has been used for wireless communications, in the case of calculating distributed power control, for example when the power transmitted by one cell affects the adjacent ones (here we have an example where there are several ‘decision makers’: several cells). Gaming, strategy and telecommunications at the same time …

Communications in the sky

Satellite communications are a lesser known means of telecommunication compared to fiber, DSL, wireless, etc. However their possibilities are quite wide. Their have a very broad reach, which makes them really suitable for broadcast applications like Satellite TV. For example, satellite TV is surviving and being profitable despite deploying costs are huge.

But what about transmitting personal communications? The problem is that in this case the capacity is limited because it depends on the number of total communications, while broadcasting uses a fixed bandwidth to transmit data in the downlink. At the same time it requires big power to be transmitted by the handsets… Actually attempts of creating mobile operators through satellites sunk. Now let’s fly with our imagination and think in a future with colonies in Mars and other planets… Then satellites could be the ‘fiber’ that interconnects the world nowadays. Hundreds of satellites deployed in the space acting as repeaters to link planets one to another, does it sound sci-fi?

Wireless world congress

For the second year in a row, Barcelona has been the host city for the GSM World Congress, the biggest annual event of the GSM Association, which gathers almost one thousand members in the mobile industry. Each year, the main players in the arena dress up to astonish the telecom world: no one can be left behind.

This year one of the main actors has been the content producers and internet companies. Probably operators trust them a lot to boost their 3G networks. Another interesting point is the strong irruption of Chinese manufacturers, while other big players have switched part of their business to other activities more related to IT solutions providers. For those readers that are Spanish speakers, you can check the Vodafone blog for this Congress with some interesting topics. Apart from the convergence happening in this world, what would you expect for the future of wireless communications?

Squeezing the spectrum

A more technical post today: let’s talk about ultra-wideband (UWB). The frequency spectrum for wireless communications is becoming quite scarce, and expensive for some operators… So it’s like a ‘natural resource’ with some slight differences: its amount is fixed and we know it (well, theoretically frequencies are infinitely extended, but other thing is that they are feasible), and their extensive use is not exhausting the resource nor polluting the environment…

UWB uses a very large bandwidth (more than 500 Mhz, imagine commercial UMTS mobile communications use carriers of 5Mhz…). And the more bandwidth tat is used, the more is the throughput. Although this is some kind of tricky because they have to use very high frequencies, and the range is very low Taking into account Shannon limit for the wireless channel, that states that the highest the bandwidth, the lower the signal to noise ratio required for a certain throughput. Also the emission levels permitted are relatively small. Therefore its main use will be for personal area networks.

Wide Wireless World

What do you want wires for? It’s not only that they occupy a space in our room, house, etc, neither that they are not the most fashionable way of decorating your house… It’s also that you can go to spend the afternoon to the park and have connectivity to anywhere in the world with your laptop and your phone for example.

Doesn’t that sound great? Well, it’s still in developing process. The reliability and speed of today’s fixed lines (DSL, cable, etc.) cannot be comparable to the wireless ones. But soon wireless technologies such as ‘Beyond 3G’ and WiMAX (although still to be proven their feasibility) will hit the ground.

A new technology has appeared into the scene: xG, a low power and long range system. It’s said that it transmits data 3 times faster than other technologies, at the same power and frequency. As WiMAX, it needs still to be proven… Have you heard of other broadband technologies apart from the standardized ones?