The Future of Wireless Handsets! (personally for Computer students).

As personal wireless connectivity is becoming more widespread and more complex, the ability to provide service on the many levels available to wireless users using a variety of devices is also rapidly becoming much more complex. To accommodate these challenges and to face a future where there are no barriers to access using a handheld device, engineers are investigating what measures are needed to create a "universal communicator," a device that is capable of communicating regardless of the connection options available to the user.

There are several options for personal wireless communication currently available through service providers. The majority of users connect via cellular connections: either using the GSM family of networks (GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS), or the CDMA family of cellular networks (CDMA, CDMA 2000, 1xRTT, EV-DO, EV-DV). However, with the advent of wireless standards for WLAN and WMAN, deployment of these networks is steadily increasing in enterprises, public "hotspots" and even within homes. Although widespread deployment is still a few years away, these networking options are open to users now.

Additionally, various Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies are emerging as well. Bluetooth is well on its way to becoming the most widely deployed WPAN technology in handsets and other devices -- with projections of nearly 300 million Bluetooth-enabled devices in the marketplace in 2007 ( WLAN and Bluetooth Update: Beyond the Hype, Forrester Research, June 16, 2003). Looking a few years down the road, Ultra Wideband (UWB) holds great promise as the next major technology for high-bandwidth wireless personal area connectivity.

Finally, a number of other wireless technologies are in the midst of being tested and/or deployed. For example, GPS is slated to ship in over 10 million phones this year, and several major device manufacturers are already shipping products with TV and/or radio receivers. Several operators and OEMs are also experimenting with including digital video broadcast (DVB) receivers in handsets, in some cases with GPRS used as a back channel to enable interactive data delivery (otherwise known as "datacasting").

Technology Challenges

Enabling such ubiquitously-connected devices poses numerous difficult technology challenges. These include:

• Multiple Radio Integration and Coordination: Building the handset (or other device) begins with the challenge of integrating multiple radios.
• Intelligent Networking -- Seamless Roaming and Handoff: Users will expect to roam within and between networks like they do with their cell phone.
• Power Management: As handsets and other devices evolve to run more rich applications, power management will become an even greater challenge.
• Support for Cross Network Identity and Authentication: Providing a trusted, efficient and usage-model appropriate means of establishing identity is one of the key issues in cross-network connectivity.
• Support for Rich Media Types: The addition of a high-bandwidth broadband wireless connection, such as a WLAN or some of the forthcoming UMTS or EVDV/O cellular networks, will open up new opportunities for the delivery of rich media to handheld devices.
• Flexible, Powerful Computing Platform: The foundation of a universal communicator-class device must be a flexible, powerful, general-purpose processing platform.
• Overall Device Usability: The final challenge inherent in building a mixed-network device is usability.

To address these challenges, Intel engineers are developing a suite of key client technologies that can enable transparent, ubiquitous connectivity, as well as an architecture that pulls that set of technologies together into a coherent whole. Intel has dubbed that suite of technologies and the associated architectural framework, Adaptive Communication Technologies (ACT). As Intel develops these building blocks, Intel will diffuse this technology either via Intel silicon and platforms, or through cooperative efforts with other industry leaders and/or application developers. 

The Prototype Concept

As a starting point for ACT development efforts, Intel has developed a first-generation universal communicator handset prototype. This prototype not only demonstrates the ability to successfully integrate multiple network access capabilities (in this case WWAN+WLAN) in a handset, but also demonstrates several key technologies and design principles that Intel believes are applicable to a larger class of universal communicator-class devices.

The universal communicator prototype demonstrates key usage models for mixed-network handheld clients, including:

• Simultaneous data and voice sessions
• Infofueling -- smart data transfers using best available network
• Rich media that scales across network connections
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  Voice (cellular and VOIP) across multiple networks

(posted by Roger Hurwitz and  Bryan Peebler. his article was originally published in Intel's Technology@Intel Magazine.)