Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Viral Communications Media Laboratory Research

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:37:37 -0500

Viral Communications Media Laboratory Research
Andrew Lippman
David P.Reed

DRAFT May 19th, 2003
Abstract

Communications are poised to become personal, embedded features of the world
around us. New
technologies allow us to make wired and wireless devices that are ad hoc,
incrementally installed
and populous almost without limit. They need no backbone or infrastructure in
order to work —
instead, they use neighbors to bootstrap both bit delivery and geolocation. This
re-distributes
ownership of communications from a vertically integrated provider to the
end-user or end-device
and segregates bit delivery from services. Communications can become something
you do rather
than something you buy. This new research program explores the enabling
principles for these viral
communicators and will demonstrate their fundamental ability to scale and
automatically configure
themselves through a diverse set of applications including live voice, secure
transmission, lowpower/
high-availability signaling, and sensors with a sense of place. We will address
this in
economic and social cases that include telephony, media distribution, safety and
emerging markets.

Introduction

Innovation often comes in waves when the social and economic environments
synchronize around
a technologically primed opportunity. This happened in the 1930s with the
telephone, in the 1950s
with the automobile and in the 1980s with the personal computer. The
communication industry is
facing a similar disruption. As in the past, vertically integrated giants tied
to centralized or
mainframe technologies and services are being eclipsed by newcomers with new
ideas about
individual ownership, incremental adoption and instant turnover. Technology
enables the change by
making local intelligence affordable; society transforms that power into
something useful to them,
and the potential for diffuse economic investment fuels new options. The Viral
Communications
Program at the MIT Media Laboratory addresses this opportunity; companies can
succeed by
using research to “see around corners” rather than plow a straight line.

The key idea is communications devices that work with no central backbone and
scale almost
without bound. They are based on reinterpreting the basic principles of wireless
in the light of
economically viable digital radios that can expand spectrum capacity even as
they use it. This
apparent contradiction is resolved by real-time RF processing that
collaboratively distributes signals
and reduces the power required at each node. As with the PC, this fundamental
shift in
architecture, moves communications intelligence from the core of a network to
the ends, and builds
upon a viral architecture* that enables infinite growth and vastly reduced
costs of innovation.

Applications range from wearable health monitors that find the nearest
doctor, to smart parking meters that can download a movie to your car
while billing you for parking. They can extend radio service into elevators,
basements and stairwells, and can be both secure and multi-party. These
emergent communicators need not require traditional “accounts” nor exist
as centrally created services – they can be unlicensed, personalized, digital,
renegade and “below
the noise floor.” Because they can grow virally, they need not be provided by
traditional
communications companies.

The program targets a wireless, copperless communications future – one that uses
photons (both
optical and RF) as its core networking technology. Instead of reserving wireless
for special
applications that require mobility, we view it as the norm. We anticipate a time
when wires are the
special case, needed primarily for power distribution. 802.11 points the way: it
is the wrong
technical solution to the right social and economic problem.

Our research frontier entails creation of infrastructure-free, scalable networks
that conserve
operating power, interoperate with existing systems, adapt to new radio
techniques as they appear,
and minimize the cost of functional evolution. This is feasible in the near
term. We will demonstrate
it through sample applications in domains as diverse as sensor nets and personal
telephony.

* A Viral Communications Architecture is one where elements are independent,
scalable and where each new
element adds capacity to the system, so that it can be adopted incrementally
from a small base and gains
accelerating value with scale.

More:
http://dl.media.mit.edu/viral/viral.pdf

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