Internet unwired

Arguably the Internet could be regarded as one of the most dramatic developments of the 20th Century. The precursor to the Internet was developed in the 60s as Arpanet, with the objective of coming out with a new networking technology that can withstand any impending onslaught by the enemy during the cold war. Later it was further developed under NSFnet in the 80s connecting most major universities in the USA together as a test bed for research collaborations. Early applications were for Usenet (much like an e group), e mail, and file transfer which were powerful tools for academic exchange. Then came the killer applications, hypertext and browser in the 90s, which formed the foundation of the World Wide Web, and the rest so to speak, is history. The Internet was initially designed to connect fixed computers together and with data centres, but when worked with the wireless technology the outcome is astounding-the outcome is wireless or mobile Internet. With Mobile Internet, users are free to move around and indeed roam from one area to another while remaining connected. This scenario has opened up fascinating service opportunities; besides providing Internet access to mobile users, it also enables many new services to be offered direct to the mobile users. Further, mobile Internet also enables machine to machine connectivity with applications like Wireless Sensor Networks, Mobile Ad Hoc networks are two examples. This talk will dwell on the two constituent technologies that make up mobile Internet i.e. the wireless and the Internet. First, the evolution of telecommunications will be highlighted in order to underline their contributions to the whole picture. Then it touches on the development of packet switching and the Internet, and discusses how it has transformed the way telecommunications services have developed. Then the talk will delve into the technical details of the challenges of wireless communications, the technologies that have been developed to handle them, and some major technology breakthroughs. This leads to the discussion of various generations of the cellular technologies, the competing mobile IP family of standards, and the Quality of Service (QoS) issues. Some enabling technologies such as Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Cross Layer Design (CLD) are also discussed as a peek into the future.

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