How wireless technologies influence our lives

Continued from page: 1

Friday, November 02, 2007

Personal applications of WiFi
We can safely say that WiFi technologies have been successful in the enterprise domain, but lately we have started observing their adoption in the personal computing and home-office segment, also. It is because, while WiFi still struggles to meet the bandwidth requirements of a typical enterprise, it has to face no such limitations in a modern home. Let's face it square, today a typical living room doesn't just have a single entertainment device, such as TV or a music system. We have media centers, gaming devices, digital music players, and probably a desktop PC. All of them sit in the same living room and need to be connected to each other and also to the Internet. As we don't have homes with structure cabling, so WiFi becomes the preferred choice for such setups. The trend becomes evident when you see a TV with WiFi. This means that if you have a bunch of video files on a PC, you can now directly stream it to your TV screen, without even requiring a single piece of wire or any additional device.

Personal applications of Wireless USB
Wireless USB (WUSB) is an innovation of the USB Implementers Forum. It is a standard, meant for short-range high-bandwidth connections for USB devices. WUSB has been developed on the WiMedia Alliance's Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) common radio platform. This platform is capable of sending data at speeds of 480 Mbps for distances up to 3 meters and at 110 Mbit/s for distances up to 10 meters. It operates in the range of 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. The product for this is still not out in the market, but we are actually waiting for them to reach us, as soon as possible. Want to know, why? Imagine, I reach office with a 4 GB Wireless USB disk. Now, without even a need of taking it out from my pocket, I can boot a machine wirelessly, with all my personal applications and settings. And that's not all, the possibilities are endless.

Personal applications of ZigBee
If you interested in low-powered, short-distance, and low-speed (just 250 Kbps) connections, think of the ubiquitous bee-the Motorola invention 'ZigBee'. ZigBee also uses the 2.4 GHz free-to-use radio band and is suited to tasks where other transceivers would quickly fizzle out. There will soon be a nest of ZigBees that will form their own peer-to-peer 'meshes'. It is ideal to be used with embedded applications that require low data transfer rates and are also power-constrained. ZigBee promises a completely networked home where all devices are able to communicate and be controlled by a single unit. Imagine a home with different entertainment units, various security systems like fire and intrusion protections, air-conditioners and other appliances that have embedded applications supporting ZigBee and through a single unit all these devices could be accessed and controlled. And as this device is going to consume low power, it will have extended battery usage life. You can think of similar home-office scenarios, as well.

A car stereo integrated with Bluetooth. You can directly stream music files from any Bluetooth mobile device and enjoy your favorite music while driving

Personal applications of Bluetooth
Yes it's old. But that reaffirms the old adage, which says 'the old is gold'. With the advent of Bluetooth, we first heard the concept of a PAN (Personal Area Network). Now, the network has become more sophisticated and we call it a HAN (Home Area Network). The applications based on Bluetooth standards are gradually coming in the market, further boosting such networking concepts. Now we have a car stereo system which comes integrated with Bluetooth, so that you one can directly stream your music files stored in phones to the car stereo system. Not only that, the car stereo gets mute when a call comes to the phone.

Using a mobile phone you can control all electric equipment such as ACs, geysers, TVs, etc wirelessly using Bluetooth

But trust me this is not going to end up in the car stereos. We are seeing software and infrastructures that can integrate all your digital lifestyle systems over the Bluetooth to update your proximity and presence in an intelligent system environment. Bluetooth being a small distance communication channel gives the flexibility to devices kept in a room to sense that someone is entering the room and the person can also be identified. All this can happen by the Bluetooth connection of the person's phone. So, if you want to hide yourself from your manager, you just have to keep your mobile's Bluetooth connectivity off!

Coming back to the waiting area, once a visitor enters the waiting area of your office you can greet him, simply by setting some messages, as soon as your Bluetooth system detects his arrival. Or for that matter as your friend enters your car, the car starts playing music of her choice. Start her favorite TV channel, etc. Not only this, when a phone call comes to any mobile in the car, the celebration goes to mute. Once the call is over, the device again tunes back to normal.

No, this is not the future or science fiction. This is possible today and that too at an affordable price. You can try out the SmartHome project from LinuxMCE at http://linuxmce.com/ for more details about such devices and applications. You can even buy such readymade products and solutions from a company called IPTriplePlay. The name of the solution is Pluto. You can see a nice flash video demo of such a smart home at  http://www.iptp.net/showflash_en.html. These are only a few names but trust me there are a handful of vendors and products in the market, and their tribe is growing fast.

Page(s)   1  2