Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Brainy Radio

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:54:39 -0500

Brainy Radio
By Joab Jackson
February 11, 2003

A personal digital assistant (PDA) falls from its owner's pocket
during lunch. After a little while on the restaurant floor, it
awakens, calls home, and notifies its owner that it has been left
behind. That's all in a day's work for a "cognitive radio," a
wireless device that's aware of its environment and learns from
its user.

Cognitive radios don't exist yet. But Joseph Mitola, a computer
scientist at Mitre, in Bedford, MA, aims to make them a reality by
exploiting the added processing power that will be built into
tomorrow's wireless devices. Mitola is one of the pioneers of
"software radio," which gives users of cell phones and other
two-way radios the ability to use a single device to communicate
over a range of frequencies.

Now Mitola is thinking about other applications -- such as
artificial-intelligence -- based learning for wireless devices
stuffed with software. "A cognitive radio learns the preferences
of its user without being explicitly programmed," Mitola says.

As a first step, Mitola has customized a simulated PDA to glean
owner preferences from text-based information. To learn from other
kinds of patterns, wireless devices need a standardized way to
describe and track such factors as location and transmission
conditions, so Mitola has crafted a computer language that will do
just that.

Before sending data to the home office of a cost-conscious
enterprise, for instance, a cognitive PDA with software written in
Mitola's new language might automatically search for a cheap
wide-area-network connection before it would use a more expensive
cellular network.

Mitola is also working with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency to spot promising applications in areas such as
battlefield radios that can detect and outmaneuver jamming
attempts. He cautions, though, that it could take a decade for
handheld devices to gain enough processor power and memory to
achieve cognition on this scale.

Cognitive radio eventually will benefit both military and
commercial carriers, believes Jeffrey Reed, deputy director of
Virginia Polytechnic Institute's Mobile and Portable Radio
Research Group, whose investigators are studying ways networks of
cognitive radios might interact.

Wireless providers, especially, will need machine-driven ways to
guide customers through the panoply of options for voice and data
communication for so-called fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless
services. Says Reed, "I think this is where 4G is going."

© 2002 Technology Review

http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/20731.html

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