The Future of Wireless: Imagination Drives Innovation

Wireless system design is one of the hottest fields in electrical engineering. We recently asked 10 engineers to prognosticate on the future of wireless technology. Alexander Popov, a Bulgaria-based engineer, writes: These days, we are constantly connected to the Internet. People expect quality service both at home and on the go. Cellular networks are meeting this demand with 4G and upcoming 5G technologies. A single person now uses as much bandwidth as an entire Internet provider 20 years ago. We are immersed in a pool of information, but are no longer its sole producers. The era of Internet of Things is upon us, and soon there will be more IoT devices than there are people. They require quite a different ecosystem than we people use. Тheir pattern of information flow is usually sporadic, with small chunks of data. Connecting to a generic Wi-Fi or cellular network is not efficient. IoT devices utilize well established protocols like Bluetooth LE and ZigBee, but dedicated ones like LPWAN and 6LoWPAN are also being developed and probably more will follow. We will see more sophisticated and intelligent wireless networks, probably sharing resources on different layers to form a larger WAN. An important aspect of IoT devices is their source of power. Energy harvesting and wireless power will evolve to become a standard part of the “smart” ecosystem. Improved technologies in chip manufacturing processes aid hardware not only by lowering power consumption and reducing size, but also with dedicated embedded communication stack and chip coils. The increased amount and different types of information will allow software technologies like cloud computing and big data analysis to thrive. With information so deep in our personal lives, we may see new security standards offering better protection for our privacy. All these new technologies alone will be valuable, but the possibilities they offer combined are only limited by our imaginations. Best be prepared to explore a