- Is the information superhighway
on the verge of a traffic jam?
(pulsing electronic music)
The internet of things promises us
a very user-friendly future,
where our gadgets talk
with our other gadgets
as well as with us.
We estimate that by 2020 there
will be 50 billion gadgets
connected to the internet,
but that raises the question:
How is all of this communication
actually happening?
And often it's through radio spectrum,
but there's a catch with that,
because only certain radio
frequencies are really good
at transmitting data, and a lot of those
have been allocated for other uses,
like cell phone towers or radio
stations, or military radar.
Think of the radio
spectrum like a highway.
You keep adding more and more data,
that makes the traffic get
snarled, and what do you do?
You can't make the highway
any wider than it already is.
This is what some experts are
calling the spectrum crunch.
It could be what we're looking
at with radio frequencies,
so does that mean that in the future
when you want to upload
a picture from your phone
to Tumblr it's gonna take 15 minutes?
Not necessarily, because
a lot of smart people
are working on this problem
to avoid the spectrum crunch
in little creative innovative ways.
One way is just through creative sharing.
Here in the United States the
FCC allocates what spectrum
belongs to what task, like
broadcast network television,
but you might live in an area
where that part of the spectrum
isn't really used that much,
but you are not allowed to use it,
because it's not allocated to you.
This is where cognitive
radios could come in handy.
Cognitive radios are able
to detect unused parts
of the spectrum and route data there.
Going back to the traffic analogy,
it's like a driver seeing
an opening in another lane
and changing lanes quickly and safely.
In this case that's what
the cognitive radio's doing,
and when a primary user
needs that spectrum back,
it can switch back out
so that traffic continues
to move smoothly and safely.
How about a different approach though,
how about something called
ambient backscatter,
which I first thought was
a new kind of house music.
Turns out that's not what it is at all.
Actually it's a power free
source for radio communication,
it actually depends upon
the ambient radio waves
in the area, a device would
be hit by incoming radio waves
from a cell tower or broadcast TV tower,
and it would absorb some waves,
reflect some other waves,
creating zeroes and ones
that become a message to other devices.
Researchers at the
University of Washington
who developed this technology,
say there are lots of
different applications.
For instance, let's say you
put a sensor on your keys
and a sensor in your couch
so when you leave your keys
in your couch, your couch can
tell you where your keys are.
Or for a more serious
use, you could have it
on bottles of medication,
so that way you never forget
to take your medicine
before you leave the house.
We're getting closer and closer
to that internet of things,
and the amazing future of it,
but it's really gonna be
the internet of people
that cooperate and innovate together
to make that possibility a reality.
So I have a question for
all of you out there.
What technology do you think
needs the most innovation
to make the internet of things a reality?
I wanna hear in the comments below.
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(electronic music)
