Cornet unveils breakthrough to unclog Wifi, radio spectrum

"If everyone talks at once, nobody will understand anything. If everyone gets a window of time to speak, it works out.”

By NIV ELIS
wifi 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
wifi 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Cornet, a consortium of companies and research centers operating under a program in the chief scientist’s office of the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry, unveiled a breakthrough on Monday for sharing space on the radio spectrum, which wireless devices rely on to communicate.
“The amount of information we have to transfer has grown by orders of magnitude, far more quickly than was forecasted,” explained Bat-Sheva Ovadia, chairwoman of Cornet, which stands for Cognitive Radio Networks, and executive strategy officer at Telematics Wireless.
Governments auction off licenses for various entities – such as radio stations, television broadcasters and cellular phone companies – to use specific frequencies on the wireless spectrum. A small, unlicensed portion of the spectrum is cordoned off for use by WiFi devices, which have to share that part of the spectrum.
Cornet’s “cognitive” technology detects which frequencies WiFi devices and their users are occupying, allotting them more efficiently as conditions change and devices connect or disconnect.
“It’s like a conversation. If everyone talks at once, nobody will understand anything. If everyone gets a window of time to speak, it works out,” Ovadia said. “The system always checks what’s going on around it.”
Each of the institutions that comprise Cornet – companies including Elbit Systems, Elisra (Tadiran Spectralink), Telematics Wireless, Wavion/Alvarion Wireless Networks, Altair and Amimon, not to mention the 13 academic research groups from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev – are incorporating the technology into their products and marketing them on their own.
Ovadia believes that major players in the tech world will quickly adopt the innovations, even in the licensed cellular sphere.
“I am confident that in a few years we will see cognitive technology in almost all wireless communications,” she said.