Lunch & Learn: Wireless: Revolution and Evolution with H. Vincent Poor

Any­one, any­time, anyplace.

By virtue of its mobil­ity, porta­bil­ity, and ease of con­nec­tiv­ity, wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity pro­vides users with unprece­dented free­dom, sug­gests H. Vin­cent Poor, Michael Henry Strater Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing and Dean of the School of Engi­neer­ing and Applied Sci­ence.

Wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tions is among our most advanced, and rapidly advanc­ing, tech­nolo­gies, he notes. New wire­less appli­ca­tions and ser­vices emerge on an almost daily basis, and the num­ber of users of these ser­vices is grow­ing at an expo­nen­tial rate. More than half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion uses cell phones, and this is only one of a daz­zling array of wire­less tech­nolo­gies that have emerged in recent times.

At the April 21 Lunch ‘n Learn sem­i­nar, H. Vin­cent Poor, sur­veyed the tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape, some of its his­tory and soci­etal impli­ca­tions, emerg­ing devel­op­ments, and recent issues in wire­less research.

Rail­roads reached near ubiq­uity in terms of the num­ber of coun­tries using the tech­nol­ogy in 125 years. The tele­phone took nearly 100. Per­sonal com­put­ers took 25 years. Remark­ably, the mobile phone has taken just 15 years. More than just a per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions device, it has become an engine of com­merce in both the devel­oped an devel­op­ing world. Indeed, the tech­nol­ogy has per­mit­ted coun­tries in the third world to leapfrog the need for exten­sive land lines.

The results are extra­or­di­nary, says Poor. There are now more than 8 bil­lion text mes­sages a day, pic­ture mes­sag­ing has become stan­dard, mobile gam­ing is grow­ing, and video mes­sag­ing has begun to emerge. We are approach­ing 5 bil­lion cel­lu­lar sub­scribers with explo­sive growth in wire­less appli­ca­tions cov­er­ing all key areas, from sci­ence and med­i­cine, trans­porta­tion and com­merce, secu­rity and defense, through enter­tain­ment and social net­work­ing. And, as a result, it is a very lucra­tive busi­ness, account­ing for more than $1 tril­lion a year.

The main chal­lenge of wire­less, notes Poor, is to pro­vide the ser­vices famil­iar to wired sys­tems, but with mobil­ity. The chal­lenges grow with higher capac­ity, and more simul­ta­ne­ous users in quickly mov­ing vehi­cles. New 4G net­works promise to pro­vide reli­able high speed con­nec­tiv­ity for highly mobile users.

The one clear trend, says Poor, is the con­ver­gence of com­put­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The cell phone, now an iPhone or an Android, is now both a com­put­ing plat­form and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device. In the years to come, he pre­dicts, cars and homes will become nodes on the inter­net, inven­to­ries will be tracked auto­mat­i­cally through built in wire­less sen­sors, and we will habit­u­ally use a range of location-based and social net­work­ing services.

In his talk, Poor high­lighted three areas of wire­less research. In each, the appli­ca­tion, or “pull” is matched by the “push,” inter­est­ing research at the phys­i­cal layer, the the­ory and method­ol­ogy of data transmission.

The first involves secur­ing wire­less trans­mis­sion, a more com­plex under­tak­ing in the absence of a phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture. It is pos­si­ble to exploit the fun­da­men­tal physics of the net­work, says Poor, to make them more secure. The idea takes advan­tage of the fact that indi­vid­ual net­work con­nec­tions exhibit dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal prop­er­ties due to the ran­dom­ness of radio prop­a­ga­tion. On-going research in this area involves cod­ing the­ory, cryp­tog­ra­phy, game the­ory, and cross-layer net­work design.

The sec­ond research area involves sen­sor net­works and dis­trib­uted learn­ing. Indi­vid­ual sen­sors within a wider grid mea­sure a sub­set of large data sets, and each sen­sor can com­mu­ni­cate with neigh­bor­ing sen­sors to make opti­mal infer­ences about their phys­i­cal surroundings.

The third research area involves the inter­ac­tion of the wire­less infra­struc­ture with social net­works, impos­ing a com­plex new struc­ture. A famous prob­lem in social psy­chol­ogy, the small world prob­lem, sug­gests that any two peo­ple on the planet are sep­a­rated by six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion. Small net­work analy­sis can model indi­vid­u­als and their local and long-range inter­ac­tions. It turns out, says Poor, that if two peo­ple are sep­a­rated by enough dis­tance, you can con­clude that they are sep­a­rated by a fixed degree of sep­a­ra­tion and you can com­pute the fig­ure based upon the size of the world and its population.

Speaker Bio: H. Vin­cent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, where he also Dean of the School of Engi­neer­ing and Applied Sci­ence. His research inter­ests lie in the area of wire­less net­work­ing and related fields. Among his pub­li­ca­tions in these areas is the book MIMO Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007). Dr. Poor is a mem­ber of the National Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing, and is a Fel­low of the IEEE, the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Arts & Sci­ences and the Royal Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing of the United King­dom. He received the 2005 IEEE Edu­ca­tion Medal and the 2009 Edwin Howard Arm­strong Achieve­ment Award of the IEEE Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Society.

The pod­cast and pre­sen­ta­tion are available.