Attila: one radio on many wireless nets

Today’s wireless networks are in a rut: Most radios that form the networks can only work on one frequency band of the spectrum. If that band is glutted, glitchy or jammed, the radios are useless.

Enter Attila the Radio, invented by two researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J. The concept is simple: Attila parcels out a stream of data packets over any and all available wireless spectrum at the same time. The packets could stream, for example, over a Wi-Fi mesh, Verizon’s Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cell network, rival AT&T’s Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) airwaves, and over a WiMAX link.

Current prototypes use several radios, one for each of the networks being used, but the goal is a single radio.

Click to see: How Attila works

“Why are we still building radios like we used to build black rotary telephones?” asks Patrick White, director of Stevens’ Wireless Network Security Center, and co-inventor of Attila with colleague Nicolas Girard. Radios, like the old rotary phones, can work only on the network for which they’re designed. “If you walk away from the concept of ‘one radio, one network’ to ‘one-radio, multiple networks,’ a lot of interesting things start to happen.”

The patent-pending radio technology can associate multiple IP networks with a single TCP socket. To users, applications and the Internet, the Attilla link appears as a single network connection despite being run over several wireless networks.

The radio’s name refers not to the horse-riding Hun who nearly laid waste to the Roman Empire 1,600 years ago, but to Attila the duck, the Stevens sports mascot, who seems to have a suitably Hunnish spirit. Founded in 1870, the school is named after Col. John Stevens, who designed the first American-built steam locomotive, which he demonstrated in 1826 on a circular track near his Hoboken estate.

Notable alumnae, according to the Stevens’ Wikipedia entry, include science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp, celebrated sculptor Alexander Calder, who created the mobile as an art form, Frederick Winslow Taylor, developer of scientific management methods and time-motion studies, General Motors co-founder Charles Stewart Mott, Alfred Fielding, the co-inventor of “bubble wrap,” and the great-grandfather of current U.S. President George W. Bush, the industrialist Samuel Prescott Bush.

Officially dubbed the MultiNetwork Communicator, Attila is a form of adaptive radio, which in theory has software that can program a single chipset to work on different frequencies. What sets Attila apart from such software-defined radios is its ability to use several frequencies at the same time. Another difference is that Attila currently uses multiple radio chipsets, one for each of the different networks, and each with its own antenna system.

“Ultimately, we get to one radio,” White says. “We’d [eventually] like to see a software-defined radio that has enough ‘oomph’ to tune to multiple nets at the same time, and to distribute packets across them to deal with problems like poor connections and interference. Today, it would take too much horsepower" for one radio.