According to UC Santa Cruz professor JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves, the problem with wireless networks is that they're based on protocols that are nearly 50 years old. Their underlying technology is that of wired networks, using protocols that date back to the 1960s ARPANET. That's why Garcia-Luna-Aceves is hoping to revolutionize networking by taking a look at the science, technology, and even social side of the problem. I profiled Garcia-Luna-Aceves for the latest issue of the UC Santa Cruz Review. From the Review:
No matter how smart the software, a network, Garcia-Luna-Aceves explains, is much more than the digital technology behind the curtain. A network is also the people who use it, and the information that's exchanged across it. Those social factors and information demands should be taken into account when building wireless networks where almost every resource–from bandwidth to battery life–is at a premium.
"The notion that we need to enable everyone to talk one-to-one with everyone else, and maintain the routes to all these sites and nodes that we never use, is a big problem," Garcia-Luna-Aceves says. "So now we are studying how the flows in a network result from common interests and needs."
This idea is somewhat akin to the concept that you don't build highways to everywhere–less-traveled-to destinations are best served by small roads.
Currently, the researchers are exploring how to map a social network on top of a network infrastructure. For example, in a military setting, there's a chain of command, which is a form of social network.
So the network needn't require that every device be able to talk to every other device. Meanwhile, many military communication systems require a great deal of bandwidth, which also must be accounted for in the network architecture."Only by figuring out the social network and information network overlays can we start talking about increasing the capacity of the network and delivering quality information to the users," Garcia-Luna-Aceves says.
