Monday, December 28, 2009

Future Internet Routing Architectures

A few days ago there was a IETF draft posted about the future of Internet routing architectures, and their recommendation (still in draft, so there is no written recommendation yet). It's a pretty good read, and very interesting to see what ideas are out there for a more secure, reliable, and scalable Internet routing architecture. The link to the draft is below:

Recommendation for a Routing Architecture

If you're interested in how I found out about this IETF draft, I subscribe to their RFC and Draft RSS feeds located here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/

Friday, December 11, 2009

News in the World of Wireless

There have been a couple pretty big announcements in the past few days about new wireless standards currently in the works, and are steadily on track *fingers crossed*.

First off the new 802.11 standard 802.11ac is the next-gen WLAN standard that is working to achieve speeds of 1+ Gigabit/s. It's still fairly early in the standardization process, but it will be using the 5ghz spectrum (the 2.4ghz range is overly crowded now). To achieve the throughput, there are talks of using wider bands of 80Mhz (possibly 160Mhz), more modern modulation techniques, and MU-MIMO (multiple user - multiple input multiple output). The proposed date for this standard to be ratified is Dec 2012, but I wouldn't hold your breath on that (the 802.11n ridiculousness). Here's a great article on Ars Technica covering this in more detail:

The future of WiFi: gigabit speeds and beyond


The other wireless standard that is just around the bend is the WiGig standard that completed it's specification on Dec 10th. It provides 7 Gigabit/s (!) of speed using the 60Ghz spectrum, but obviously using that range the distance limitation is significant (i.e. not really to be used for WLANs). The specification says that it's good for 10 meters, but also has "support for beamforming, enabling robust communication at distances beyond 10 meters". This standard will be mainly used in the communication of video and audio between multimedia devices which require that kind of bandwidth (HD video and audio streams).

Some of the newest high-end HDTVs already have wireless communications from the main panel to a separate 'receiver' that houses all the inputs and outputs for the TV, and use the 60Ghz range used by this specification. I'm uncertain if they were early adopters of the specification, but could easily be assumed so since they are a part of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance.

Some key points listed on their website:

The WiGig version 1.0 specification includes the following key elements:

* Supports data transmission rates up to 7 Gbps – more than ten times faster than the highest 802.11n rate
* Supplements and extends the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard
* Physical layer enables both the low power and the high performance WiGig devices, guaranteeing interoperability and communication at gigabit rates
* Protocol adaptation layers are being developed to support specific system interfaces including data buses for PC peripherals and display interfaces for HDTVs, monitors and projectors
* Support for beamforming, enabling robust communication at distances beyond 10 meters
* Widely used advanced security and power management for WiGig devices

More info at:

http://wirelessgigabitalliance.org/