A wireless network think tank . . . with toys

When you talk to the researchers at Rutgers University's Wireless Information Network Laboratory, you wonder how anyone actually communicates with radios. Or would want to.

That's because WINLAB is focused on research to solve some of the toughest problems facing large-scale wireless nets, from radio coexistence in crowded frequencies to re-engineering the Internet for mobile traffic. Research efforts like those of WINLAB eventually will help enterprises deploy multiple radio technologies and enable their own mobile users to exploit new services delivered wirelessly.

WINLAB's reputation has been growing since its founding in 1989, the brainchild of former professor David Goodman, originally from Bell Labs and now with the National Science Foundation. The original focus, pioneering at the time, was focusing on digital CDMA radio resource management and power control, at a time “when a cell phone was a rare thing,” says Director Dipankar Raychaudhuri. (Read our Q&A with Raychaudhuri.) Much of that research is a basic feature in today's CDMA cell nets.

Now WINLAB focuses its research in three broad areas that together envision a world that is bound together by short- and long-range wireless nets, intelligent devices and sensors, and people on the go who increasingly will depend on these. The areas are the mobile Internet, which will revamp today's Internet architecture and protocols to include mobile users and wireless links; cognitive radios, which can seek out and use any available frequency; and “pervasive wireless,” or embedded sensor nets wirelessly linked with Internet-based services.

It's kind of a like a radio think tank . . . with toys, from their own cellular base stations to custom-built programmable radios that can change their personalities to run on different wireless nets. And what they mostly think about here are all the stumbling blocks to realizing this wireless future. You can get a flavor of their thinking from the titles of the 2007 theses from WINLAB's graduate students, such as “On the Scalability of Ad Hoc Networks” and “Cross Layer Network Architecture for Efficient Packet Forwarding in Wireless Networks.”