MIT wireless researcher: A breakthrough is needed

Enough with the incremental increases in wireless throughput. MIT Assistant Professor Dina Katabi is seeking a “severalfold increase” in performance and thinks she may have the answer with a project called COPE that exploits something called opportunistic coding. The idea is to exploit the broadcast and shared nature of wireless to more efficiently set up wireless networks that are largely designed now based on wired network concepts, she says. She spoke yesterday at the MIT Information Technology Conference.

Read more about her talk and about  COPE. No commercial products but Katabi’s presentation generated a load of questions and she was circled by business card-wielding  audience members after her talk asking her about everyting from use of COPE with voice-over-IP over wireless and use of the technology in call centers.

Bob Brown, bbrown@nww.com