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April 13, 2004
Buzzword of The Year
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
It's Cognitive Radio.
What gives this such resonance (that's a joke son, resonance) as a buzzword is its deep, true meaning.
We're talking here about taking the human intelligence of sharing spectrum and putting that into radios as machine intelligence.
A cognitive radio can sense its environment and location and then alter its power, frequency, modulation and other parameters so as to dynamically reuse
available spectrum.
Let's see what that means in products you use every day:
The biggest problem with home wireless gateways is that their waves have trouble punching through a house's walls but, once they reach the outside, they go on-and-on. As a result, equipment makers are reluctant to give their wireless networking gear the power they need to reach throughout the house. A cognitive radio could sense this outside interference and adjust itself accordingly.
A lot of cell phone calls are dropped as they move near the edges of a cell. If the next cell is crowded with traffic, it may drop the signal. A cognitive radio in the first cell phone tower would adjust for a few seconds, enlarging the cell slightly to pick up the slack.
FCC chair Michael Powell has been talking for the last year about things like "frequency temperature," measuring the amount of frequency use in an area and adjusting required power levels accordingly. A cognitive radio would make these adjustments automatically.
Cognitive radio can also eliminate the "interference fears" of UWB, by automatically adjusting itself.
All this came from a doctoral thesis submitted in May 2000 by Joseph Mitola,
now working for the U.S. military, but it may well have far more commercial applications than military ones. Cognitive radio allows radios to make peace with one another, to avoid interference automatically, and thus to re-use the frequency spectrum far more efficiently.
Cognitive radio makes the dream of "spectrum as an ocean" a working technology.
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
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