The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $7.5 million grant to a Rutgers-led research team to develop a future Internet design optimized for mobile networking and communication.
The team of nine universities and several industrial partners has dubbed its project "MobilityFirst", reflecting the Internet's evolution away from traditional wired connections between desktop PCs and servers toward wireless data services on mobile platforms.
The group will design a "clean-slate" network architecture to accommodate the shift of Internet traffic to smart cellular phones, tablet computers and emerging mobile data services, said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Rutgers Wireless Information Network Laboratory.
There are more than four billion mobile devices in use worldwide today, and experts predict that by 2015, these wireless devices will significantly outnumber wired devices on the Internet.
"The mobile Internet will do much more than support today's impressive lineup of smart cellular phones. It will simplify peoples interactions with their physical world", Professor Raychaudhuri said. For instance, he said, it will enable location-aware computing, allowing people to find nearby merchants or get driving or public transit directions, even if they don't know their location. It also will support machine-to-machine communications, such as wearable devices that monitor your health and communicate with hospitals or cars that alert other cars to congestion and send split-second commands to each other to avert collisions.
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