Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The Care and Feeding of Your Cognitive Radio

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 16:34:11 -0400

The Care and Feeding of Your Cognitive Radio

By Mark Frauenfelder

Joseph Mitola's latest creation - a radio with sensors and 
software that allow it to perceive the world around it and 
learn from experience. 

It's 2015, and you're taking the San Francisco-Los Angeles bullet train
to work. As the maglev train silently zips along the coast at a brisk
350 miles
an hour, you're using your PDA to put the final touches on a report for
the upcoming annual sales meeting. You're just about ten minutes from
arriving at your office when you finish up and hit the "send" button.

Because the report is loaded with graphics, it weighs in at 10
megabytes. A dialog box pop ups on your handheld: "The cost to send this
document using the BigTel wireless network is $87.16. In 9 minutes, you
will be able to send it for $0.00 using your company's internal network.
Proceed with transmission, or wait?" The decision is yours. Do you
impress your boss by giving her the report before you arrive in the
office, but risk her wrath when she learns how much you spent to save a
few minutes? Or do you wait and send your report over the company
network, showing your boss that you know how to save money?

The right choice depends on the kind of boss you have. But it's the
device that gives you this choice in the first place. The device is
called a "cognitive radio," and it's the brainchild of Mitre computer
scientist Joseph Mitola, who is under contract with Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)
to come up with ideas for a "5G" style mobile device that goes far
beyond any kind of phone or PDA available today.

Intelligent and Polite

I asked Mitola what he means by "cognitive radio." He explained that
it's a software radio that has sensors and software that allow it to
perceive the world around it and learn from experience. ("Software
radio," a term Mitola coined in 1991, describes a kind of wireless
device that can operate on different bands and in different modes
depending on the software it is running. Instead of requiring multiple
chipsets, a software radio can emulate different chipsets.) The thing
that makes cognitive radio different from software radio is good
manners. A cognitive radio, says Mitola, is a device that has "the
etiquette to listen to what's going on to determine the nature of the
noise or interference of the channels and to predict what kind of effect
its transmission at a given power level is going to have on other users
and to correct its behavior if it turns out that somebody else needs to
use the channel."

But that's just one of the things a cognitive radio will be able to do,
says Mitola. A device smart enough to share the airwaves efficiently
will be smart enough to anticipate users needs, and help them in their
daily lives. To accomplish this, a cognitive radio will have
computational models of itself, its user, the uses it's being put to,
the network, and the larger world environment. The cognitive radio uses
these internal models, along with sensors, to prioritize and enhance
communication.

For instance, a cognitive PDA might have digital thermometers built into
it, so it knows about the temperature of things in the outside world. If
the back of the PDA is 98.6 degree Fahrenheit, and the front it below
zero, the PDA will know that it is begin held by its owner, who is
probably outside in cold weather. If the temperature on both sides of
the PDA drop to zero, the device will assume that its been dropped in
the snow, and will cry for help.

Bonding With Your New Pet

Mitola likes to talk about cognitive radios as if they were living
creatures. "When you go to the store to buy a cognitive radio it would
be a cross between a pet store and FAO Schwartz because these little
critters would have built in intelligence and different kinds and styles
of personalities." Then, after you take the PDA home with you, you'd
spend a little time getting acquainted with it, and vice versa. "Some
buyers might like spilling their guts and telling their new PDA
everything about the way they want it to work," he says. Other users
might prefer to just start using the PDA, and let it learn from
observing the way its owner does things. In either case the PDA will
establish bonds with its user, "like when a young child bonds to its
mommy or daddy," says Mitola. 

Mitola dreams of the day when cognitive radio can warn him about traffic
jams. When he lived in Washington, DC, Mitola would commute to work in
his car, listening to a local radio station for traffic information. But
monitoring traffic information is something that a cognitive radio could
listen to instead. Mitola could listen to a CD, and when the cognitive
radio came across pertinent traffic data, it could interrupt the music
and warn him about the broken down semi truck blocking the left lane
three miles up the road. "Also," says Mitola, "when I'm on my boat I
like to listen to NOAA weather, so that I know about any thunderstorms
cropping up. My little PDA will listen for me, scanning for alerts. Then
I can have more fun and not have to worry so much about the weather."

How long do people have to wait before they can become proud cognitive
radio owners? Mitola usually prefaces his example with "In ten or
fifteen years..." Why so long? Two reasons. First, advances in speech
recognition technology -- an essential component to cognitive radio
development -- move much more slowly than they do in other areas of
research. Second, Moore's Law is showing signs of slowing down, meaning
the enormous amounts of raw processing power needed to fuel cognitive
radio could be a number of years away. Mitola points out that the
nascent field of nanocomputation might put Moore's Law back on track and
speed things up a bit.

But if you're looking for an excuse to give your boss for why your sales
report is late, blaming it on the fact that your don't have a cognitive
radio isn't going to cut it.

Mark Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator from Los Angeles.
Originally published Wed May 21 2003 
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=9724

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