Tag Archive for Wireless

| September 11, 2009
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802.11n Ratified -Yawn

802.11n Ratified -YawnToday (09-11-09) the IEEE Standards Board has ratified the IEEE 802.11n™-2009 amendment. This vote ends a seven year effort to, “enable rollout of significantly more scalable WLANs that deliver 10-fold-greater data rates than previously defined while ensuring co-existence with legacy systems and security implementations” according to the IEEE. The 560-page document describing 802.11n will be published in mid-October 2009. Bruce Kraemer, Chair of the IEEE Wireless LAN Working Group said in a press release,

The performance improvements achieved via IEEE 802.11n stand to transform the WLAN user experience, and ratification of the amendment sets the stage for a new wave of application innovation and creation of new market opportunities.

IEEE logoKelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA), told Network World that “The core interoperability is totally preserved with the [existing] draft certification program.” Ms. Davis-Felner says,  ”Existing draft-11n products should work seamlessly with future products based on the final standard. No existing products will have to be retested in the updated certification program.”

Today’s ratification marks the high-point for other 802.11 wireless products. This approval will green-light the development and deployment of 11n products in the enterprise. There is no longer a reason for firms deploying greenfield WLAN’s to roll put anything but  802.11n. The WFA expects 11n shipments to rise to 45% of all 802.11 shipments in 2009. Reaching 60% in 2012 based on data from market researcher ABI Research. But how long will 802.11n last?

WiGig logoNetworkWorld is reporting that Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC) and others have formed the Gigabit Wireless Alliance (WiGig). WiGig is to create anew wireless specification with a data speed of up to 6Gbps. WiGig is also actively involved with the IEEE’s 802.11ad task group. And if WiGig is to slow. James Buckwalter, a professor at the University of California San Diego has developed s a silicon-based amplifier that transmits 10Gbps wireless in 100 GHz frequency bands according to NetworkWorld. Coverage could also be over a kilometer, which beats traditional WiFi‘s 100 meters.

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The formal ratification of the IEEE 802.11n standard is a good thing. However we have recommended that clients seriously consider this technology in greenfield installs with Wi-Fi approved 802.11n since the beginning of the year.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 28, 2009
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WPA Gone in 60 Seconds

WPA Gone in 60 SecondsJapanese researchers have identified a WPA hack that could give hackers a way to read encrypted Wi-Fi traffic  in less than 1 minute. Toshihiro Ohigashi (Hiroshima University) and Masakatu Morii (Kobe University) presented a way to break the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system at the Joint Workshop on Information Security. The researchers outlined their work in a paper called “A Practical Message Falsication Attack on WPA” on August 7, 2009.

The new attack builds on 2008 research from Darmstadt University of Technology graduate students Martin Beck and Erik Tews who proved that WPA Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) could be attacked. The Beck-Tews attack only worked on short packets in a WPA implementation that supported 802.11 quality of service (QOS) features and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work.

The new threat uses “man in the middle” (MITM) attacks on WPA TKIP systems. The MITM attack uses the “chopchop” attack on a short packet (like ARP broadcasts), decipher its 64-bit Message Integrity Code (MIC), and can then craft whatever packet it wants. The new packet is coded with the proper checksums and passed along to the access point, which should accept it as genuine. Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated told IDGNews, “They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical.”

Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the TKIP algorithm. The new attack does not work on newer WPA2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director with the Wi-Fi Alliance, said that people should now use WPA2. She told IDGNews, WPA with TKIP “was developed as kind of an interim encryption method as Wi-Fi security was evolving several years ago.”

Enterprise Wi-Fi networks typically include security software that would detect the type of man-in-the-middle attack described by the Japanese researchers, Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security told ars technica. He continues, the development of the first really practical attack against WPA should give people a reason to dump WPA with TKIP, he said. “It’s not as bad as WEP, but it’s also certainly bad.”

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This is only an issue if the WLAN is secured at all.  Motorola published a report in April 2009  that says 64% of companies are neglecting WLAN security. The report claims that only 47% of companies are using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption on their wireless networks.

These attacks highlight the weaknesses of TKIP-based WLAN encryption. WPA TKIP was developed to fix the worst of the security holes in the first Wi-Fi encryption protocol, WEP. WI-Fi-certified products have had to support WPA2 since March 2006 . Users should move to AES-CCMP which requires WPA2 Personal for home and small office networks or WPA2 Enterprise for larger networks.

Using AES-CCMP may require that some network equipment installed before 2003 be reviewed as AES supports key lengths up to 256 bits, which may not be compatible with older hardware. Any remaining equipment of this vintage may need to be upgraded to newer Wi-Fi adapters, switched to Ethernet only, or retired. WPA2 has not shown any vulnerabilities to date. There is no real good reason to try to secure your WLAN with WPA-TKIP anymore.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 14, 2009
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Nokia Tries Wireless Electricity

Nokia Tries Wireless ElectricityIf someday the researchers at Nokia (NOK), are right you will be able to use wireless electricity to charge your mobile. Putting your cell phone in standby mode may no longer cause the dreaded vampire power. Vampire power is often described as pointlessly wasting electricity with little benefit other than a small red light and instant start-up.

Nokia logoAccording to an article in the UK’s Guardian, Nokia is developing a mobile phone charging system that is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves that constantly surround us. The Guardian article points out that radiowaves power the old crystal radio sets and modern radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Nokia claims that its system is able to scavenge enough ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted from Wi-Fi transmitters, cell-phone antennas, TV towers, and other sources miles away to run a cell phone. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is minute, but by harvesting radio waves across a range of frequencies it all adds up, said Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, UK.

Nokia’s device uses a wide-band antenna and two very simple passive circuits. The design of the antenna and the receiver circuit makes it possible to pick up frequencies from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz and convert the electromagnetic waves into an electrical current. The second circuit is designed to feed this current to the battery to recharge it.

“Even if you are only getting microwatts (mW), you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala told Technology Review. So far the researchers have been able to harvest up to 5 mW. Their next goal is to get in excess of 20 mW, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely. but not enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call the researcher says.  Rouvala says that his group is working towards a prototype that could harvest up to 50 mW of power, enough to slowly recharge a switched-off phone.

Earlier this year, Joshua Smith at Intel and Alanson Sample at the University of Washington, in Seattle, developed a temperature-and-humidity sensor that draws its power from the signal emitted by a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away. This only involved generating 60 mW.  Smith says that 50 mW could need around 1,000 strong signals and that an antenna capable of picking up such a range of frequencies would cause efficiency losses along the way.

Harry Ostaffe, head of marketing for Pittsburgh-based company Powercast, which sells a system for recharging sensors from about 15 meters away with a dedicated radio signal told Technology Review, “To get 50 milliwatts seems like a lot.”

If Nokia’s claims stand up, then it could push energy harvesting into mainstream consumer devices and improve their environmental footprint. Steve Beeby, an engineer and physicist at the University of Southampton, U.K., who has researched harvesting vibrational energy, adds, “If they can get 50 milliwatts out of ambient RF, that would put me out of business.” He says that the potential could be huge because MP3 players typically use only about 100 milliwatts of power and spend most of their time in lower-power mode.

According to Technology Review. Nokia is being cagey with the details of the project, but Rouvala is confident about its future: “I would say it is possible to put this into a product within three to four years.” Ultimately, though, he says that Nokia plans to use the technology in conjunction with other energy-harvesting approaches, such as solar cells embedded into the outer casing of the handset.

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As I have chronicled in the past and here, wireless power is a good solution looking for a way to be implemented. Wireless power has now hit the Gartner “Hype-Cycle.” According to the July 2009 Gartner Hype-Cycle, Wireless Power has just entered the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” zone and is still 5-10 years from mainstream adoption. 

This technology holds many benefits to the environment (less wasted electricity) and user convenience (how many proprietary power adapters do you have?), it is yet to be seen if consumer demand can overcome the inertia of the status quo and the power of big money lobbying by the coal, nuclear and utilities. Right now my money is on the money.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 27, 2009
Comments Off on Wireless Electricity Gets Closer

Wireless Electricity Gets Closer

IntelWireless Electricity Gets Closer (INTC) has been working on wireless electricity technology for several years, which I wrote about earlier, that now works over longer distances. At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View CA, on 06-18-2009, the company showed off a new variation of the idea that power can be transmitted through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.

wireless electricityIntel now calls the technology Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL). Intel’s goal of the WREL project is to cut the power cord. Building on principles proposed by MIT physicists in 2006. The WREL team has lit a 60W light bulb at a range of several feet and with 70% efficiency.

WREL works in a fashion similar to the old 1970’s Memorex commercial staring Ella Fitzgerald where a singer can shatter a glass by hitting its natural frequency, at which it absorbs energy efficiently. In the case of WREL, a coil of wire with a natural frequency around 10MHz takes the place of the glass, and a similar coil takes the place of the singer.

The technology uses two flat copper coils tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. One wire releases electromagnetic energy and the other picks it up in much the same way an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at just the right pitch, said researcher Emily Cooper. The wireless electricity transmission shows the efficiency of 90 percent at distances of up to a meter, she said.

Intel hopes the technology will be useful for charging devices like netbooks or smartphones in a room without wires. Intel also predicts the technology could be used within devices such as a laptop.  to replace the fallible wires that connect laptop screens through a hinge, Cooper said

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Intel logoIntel admits that the next milestone for the WREL project is to build a rectifying circuit that can convert the RF power to DC power without upsetting the carefully tuned pair of coils. Intel has demonstrated they can charge a light bulb with 60W of wireless electricity which should be sufficient to charge a laptop.

However to power a laptop or charge a battery, Intel will need DC power, not a 10MHz AC signal. The need to drive down the power requirements for the next generation of computing devices is also helping drive Intel’s latest attempt to break into the UMPC process market with the Atom chips and the next-generation “Moorestown” processor which boasts lower energy consumption requirements. It is also notable that Intel has a stated long-term plan of 60watts power for mainstream desktop processors, down from a maximum consumption of 130 watts of the new Pentium Extreme Edition 840, according to Benson Inkley, a senior processor applications engineer, with Intel in an article at Tom’s Hardware.

While it seems that Intel is on a trajectory to cut the power requirements and costs of owning and operating a PC fleet, it will be a while. It is much more likely that Moorestown processors are going to be aided by the pending IEEE 802.3at POE+ specification which will allow up to at least 30W which can be used to charge devices. It is my guess that the reports of the demise of wired networking are greatly exaggerated until Intel figures out how to economically and safely deliver 60W through the vapor.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| May 4, 2009
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Cars Collaborate to Reduce Risks

Cars Collaborate to Reduce RisksAccording to InScience scientists and engineers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) tested an innovative technological system in the Detroit area in April 2009. The study will ultimately help protect cars and drivers from being surprised by black ice, fog, and other hazardous weather conditions.

The prototype system is designed to gather detailed information about weather and road conditions from moving cars. NCAR’s road weather system is part of IntelliDrive. IntelliDrive is a national initiative overseen by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to use new technologies to make driving safer and improve mobility.

The project included collecting information from 11 specially equipped cars in the Detroit area. Test drivers in Jeep Cherokee’s, Ford (F) Edge’s, and a Nissan Altima were on the prowl for adverse conditions. They sought out heavy rain and snow to collect, store and transmit data. The test vehicles used sensors to collect data about weather conditions such as temperature, pressure, and humidity.

on-board digital memory device recorded that informationAn on-board digital memory device recorded that information, along with indirect signs of road conditions. They recorded events like the cars windshield wipers being switched on or activation of the anti-lock braking system. The information was transmitted to a central database. There the information was integrated with other local weather data and traffic observations, as well as details about road material and alignment. The processed data will then be used to update motorists in the area when hazards are present and, when appropriate, suggest alternate routes. Engineers analyzed the reliability of the system by comparing data from the cars with other observations from radars and weather satellites.

Sheldon Drobot, the NCAR program manager in charge of the project told Inscience, “The system will tell drivers what they can expect to run into in the next few seconds and minutes, giving them a critical chance to slow down or take other action.”

Not only will the system provide motorist warnings/ It will alert emergency managers to hazardous driving conditions. The alerts would help state highway departments efficiently keep roads clear of snow. It can also help meteorologists refine their forecasts by providing them with continual updates about local weather conditions.

The tests helped the NCAR team refine its software to accurately process data from motor vehicles. “The results look very encouraging,” Drobot says. “The tests show that cars can indeed communicate critical information about weather conditions and road hazards.”

One of the biggest challenges for NCAR is how to process the enormous amounts of data that could be generated by about 300 million motor vehicles. “It’s not enough to process the information almost instantaneously,” says William Mahoney, who oversees the system’s development for NCAR. “It needs to be cleaned up, sent through a quality control process, blended with traditional weather data, and eventually delivered back to drivers who are counting on the system to accurately guide them through potentially dangerous conditions.”

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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