Roaming nets propel digital media market

Sriram Viswanathan, a director of Intel Capital's Broadband and Wireless Networking Investments group, recently commented that the newly ratified IEEE 802.16 standard for wireless broadband networks will be "the next big thing" after the now well-entrenched IEEE 802.11-based wireless local-area networks. Given the standard's many fixed and mobile media-access control and physical-layer flavors, combined with its feasibility as a back-hauling scheme for proliferating WLAN hot spots, it's hard to argue with Viswanathan's position. The standard undoubtedly will bring good times to a set number of companies with appropriate broadband wireless expertise, such as Navini, Aperto, Hybrid Networks, Alvarion, and their chip and systems suppliers.

However, the term "next big thing" has generally been reserved for mass-market technologies that have somehow penetrated beyond the Luddite mentality of the average consumer. Cell phones and DVD players are obvious examples. Now, thanks to the approaching proliferation of WLANs and wireless personal-area networks such as Bluetooth, there's a good possibility that ad hoc and mesh networking will be the next big thing as a key enabling technology, one that will unleash myriad business, gaming and content-distribution applications that will drive network usage-and, potentially, revenue.

Long confined to military applications, ad hoc networks don't depend on a central basestation to connect to others on a network. Instead, each node acts as a router to relay others' traffic, as well as its own. As such, the network topology changes quickly and often, and can function as a separate entity or connect through a node to the Internet.

Recognizing the potential of ad hoc and mesh networks, Cybiko Inc. (www.cybiko.com) has developed a new content-distribution system that capitalizes on the scheme's attributes. "Ad hoc networking is a critical backbone to a new distribution system that we desperately need in the digital content arena," said Dave Robak, general manager of advanced technologies at Cybiko (Bloomingdale, Ill.). Point-to-point ad hoc networks and the many handhelds connected to the WAN today could, because they are sandwiched between retail and over-the-air, efficiently market and distribute billions of dollars of content, Robak said. Cybiko is working on the means to enable those processes.

But many impediments exist to such a multihop networking scheme, including coordination, scalability, optimal routing and power consumption. The Internet Engineering Task Force, under the Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Group, is hard at work solving those scalability and routing problems. And it is not alone. Academia also is interested in the field, with Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue and Stanford universities all performing research into the area.