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It is the objective of this proposed two-year research program to produce a body of new knowledge and technology needed to enable universal, broadband, packet based wireless Internet access to stationary, pedestrian, and vehicular mobile users of hand-held wireless terminals, anytime and anywhere.
The combined forces of deregulation, demand for bandwidth-intensive multimedia services, strategic mergers and acquisitions, and new enabling technologies are currently driving and shaking the very foundations of the telecommunications industry. Today, our world-wide telecommunications network can be viewed as a temporary hybrid of classical voice-oriented, narrowband circuit switching capabilities and modern high speed, bandwidth-on-demand packet switching capabilities. Over the next few years, however, the capacity, range of services, new business opportunities, and ubiquity of the more modern of these two networks (the Internet) may very well force a rapid evolution toward a single next-generation integrated network in which all telecommunications services and applications (voice, data, web browsing, image, full motion video) are delivered to homes and desktops on a packet-oriented, bandwidth-on-demand basis. Transformations needed to complete such a telecommunications "convergence" are (1) greater capacity on the "core" network transmission links; (2) replacement of narrowband, voice-oriented circuit switches by modern, efficient packet switches; (3) new access technologies capable of delivering multimegabit service to individual subscribers; and (4) delivery of transportable service to wireless devices, constrained by neither the availability of appropriate subscriber cabling nor the geographical locale of the subscriber. The deployment of dense Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing (WDM) equipment addresses the first of these transformation needs. The accelerating deployment of Internet Protocol (IP) routers is meeting the second, and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and Cable Modem address the third. However, although wireless communications has enjoyed phenomenol growth over the past decade, even the most modern of currently deployed cellular/PCS systems remains narrowband, circuit-switched, and voice-oriented and, in fact, their use remains limited almost exclusively to voice. Accordingly, it is the objective of this proposed research to produce a body of new knowledge and technology needed to complete this telecommunications transformation by enabling universal, broadband, packet based wireless Internet access to stationary, pedestrian, and vehicular mobile users of hand-held wireless terminals, anytime and anywhere.
The world-wide telecommunications network can, today, be viewed as a temporary hybrid of classical voice-oriented, narrowband circuit switching capabilities and modern high speed, bandwidth-on-demand packet switching capabilities. Over the next few years, however, the capacity, range of services, new business opportunities, and ubiquity of the more modern of these two networks (the Internet) may very well force a rapid evolution toward a single next-generation integrated network in which all telecommunications services and applications (voice, data, web browsing, image, full motion video) are delivered on a packet-oriented, bandwidth-on-demand basis. Although such a telecommunications "convergence" is being accelerated by greater capacity on the "core" network transmission links, replacement of narrowband, voice-oriented circuit switches by modern, efficient packet switches, and new access technologies capable of delivering multimegabit service to individual subscribers, the delivery of transportable service to wireless devices, constrained by neither the availability of appropriate subscriber cabling nor the geographical locale of the subscriber, remains elusive. Accordingly, it is the objective of this proposed research to produce a body of new knowledge and technology needed to enable universal, broadband, packet based wireless Internet access for stationary, pedestrian, and vehicular mobile users of hand-held wireless terminals, anytime and anywhere. In this regard, although there are numerous physical level modulation and coding issues that are readily envisioned, we have chosen not to focus on these but, rather, to focus instead on changes, enhancements, and new functionality needed in the handset, the communication protocols, the networking service disciplines for maintaining QoS guarantees, the encoding of visual information, and the Internet infrastructure itself; these are domains where the issues may well be significantly more complex and thought-provoking. To address these issues, we envision a multidisciplinary research program involving circuits, image and video processing, network management and control, and telecommunications protocols. Specific interrelated thrusts of this proposed research shall include enhancements needed to TCP when one link of the end-to-end connection is wireless, support of end-to-end Quality of Service objectives for multimedia traffic, access to image databases over wireless links, and the use of reconfigurable logic in wireless computing devices.
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Affiliated Faculty
CoRe Research Projects