As Yogi Berra reportedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Tough, yes, but it’s also necessary for anyone wishing to participate in the development of, invest in, or use developing technologies. With the exponential growth of computing and telecommunications, keeping up with developments is challenging. Thus it is helpful to have works like this book, which contains a series of papers on different aspects of how the authors expect wireless infrastructure and the things that connect to it will evolve over the period up to or beyond year 2050. The papers were written as a follow on to a seminar held in June 2015. Themes one finds here are advances in wireless communications; the increasing connectivity of both people and devices, the latter referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT); and implications of the increasing amount of computational power and storage capacity that will be available to people.
As the number of people and devices wirelessly connected to the Internet grows along with the demand for increasingly higher transmission speeds, wireless carriers will need to adjust their architectures, both hardware and software, to accommodate the demands. Thus we can expect advances that involve software-defined radios to optimize radio frequency usage, techniques to improve energy efficiency and support large numbers of low-power devices such as sensors, and the use of virtualization to efficiently support vastly larger numbers of connected people and devices.
We may also expect significant advances in end-user devices. Examples discussed include convergence of the IoT with automobiles and medical devices. Cars, for example, will move toward autonomous operation, including communication among cars near each other. Such functions will reduce congestion, improve safety, and improve the riders’ transportation experiences. In medical systems, the IoT will provide people with ways to monitor their health continuously and noninvasively. Mobile phones, which are small but powerful computers with multiple radios and sensors on board, will serve as the interface to many of the medical sensors.
Big data has a role to play in this future scenario. The amount of data generated by one vehicle, for example, could be many terabytes per day. Gathering and analyzing data relevant to improving safety likely will require high bandwidth and high processing power. There is thus an expanded role for the cloud in the future.
Then we must consider security. The importance of secure systems such as vehicles will grow as devices gain autonomy along with high-speed connections to the Internet. Riders in a car will quite dislike being taken for a ride by a hacker. This also holds true for someone with a programmable medical device such as a pacemaker.
The book has some flaws. The authors by and large have English as a second language. Although most of the papers are reasonably understandable, one finds some rough spots. The book is intended for “casual readers,” but at least one paper is loaded with acronyms that make comprehension difficult for such a reader. Writers who work in one field but choose to write about another should be very careful with their research. One paper makes some rather extreme statements about the effects of global warming, the science of climate being an area undergoing tremendous debate, and one that clearly is not sufficiently well understood to make any sort of accurate prediction.
Overall, the book provides some reasonable guidance as to the evolution and growth of wireless technologies over the next few decades. Some of the papers are rather technical, and others are less so, meaning that a wide audience can use this book to get useful information about this area.
