Nothing kills innovation like having to reinvent the wheel. Imagine how dull your diet would be if you had to build a new stove and hammer out a few cooking pots every time you wanted to test a new recipe. Until just a couple of years ago, electronics researchers testing new high-speed wireless technologies faced just this sort of problem; they had to build every test system completely from scratch. So, the Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) of Rice University set out to change that in 2006 by creating a turnkey, open-source platform -- the stove, pots and kitchen utensils, if you will -- that would let wireless researchers expand their tech menus. In just two short years, the platform -- dubbed WARP -- has whetted the appetites of heavyweights like Nokia, MIT, Toyota, NASA and Ericsson, and it's already being used to test everything from low-cost wireless Internet in rural India to futuristic "unwired" spacecraft. WARP stands for "wireless open-access research platform," and physically, WARP looks like something from the guts of a desktop computer. It's a collection of boards containing a powerful processor and all the transmitters and other gadgets needed for high-end wireless communications. What makes WARP boards so effective is their flexibility. When researchers need to test several kinds of radio transmitters, wireless routers and network access points, all they need to do is write a few programs that allow the WARP board to become each of those devices.
The concept is already starting to pay off. Motorola is using the system to test an entirely new low-cost architecture for wireless Internet in rural India. It's the sort of low-profit-margin project that probably wouldn't have gotten beyond the drawing board if not for WARP, he said. Another early adopter, NASA, is using WARP to look for ways to save weight, cost and complexity in the wiring systems for future spacecraft. The cognitive wireless concept stems from the fact that up to half of the nation's finite wireless spectrum is unused at any given time. Researchers have talked for years about designing smart, "cognitive" networks that can shift frequencies on the fly, opening up vast, unused amounts of spectrum for consumer use. WARP provides an entry point for people to test new ideas about cognitive wireless, researchers are answering the fundamental questions: how much spectrum can really be reused without hurting current sporadically used services and more importantly, build practical proof-of-concept prototypes, etc. Several large wireless companies are using WARP to test schemes for wireless phone networks that can transfer data up to 100 times faster than current 3G networks. Toyota is using WARP to test car-to-car communications -- systems that automotive engineers hope to use in the future for collision avoidance, traffic management and more. In another case, some users were partially disassembling the boards to add new functions. It was still cheaper than starting from scratch, so it made sense, but it wasn't something CMC had expected.More information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090129113318.htm