Renewing U.S. Telecommunications Research (2006) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Case for Renewed Investment in Telecommunications Research
3 The Case for Renewed Investment in Telecommunications Research
Pages 32-44
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From page 32... ...
. Major advances have occurred, for example, in the underlying "physical layer" communications technologies for wireless, optical fiber, and wireline transmission.
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THE CASE FOR RENEWED INVESTMENT IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH 33 and whose tremendous communications capacity has enabled significant transformations of the public switched telephone network, cable systems, and the Internet; and · Broadband local access communication, enabled by technological innovations such as digital subscriber line and cable modems, which has made high-speed Internet access widely available to homes and small businesses. Disruptive technological change has occurred at the protocol and network levels as well.
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From page 34... ...
These and other spin-offs also demonstrate that making major advances in telecommunications requires the solution of technical problems across the spectrum from theory to device physics to software, yielding results that can have broad utility. Research for National Defense and Homeland Security Research in commercial and defense applications of telecommunications has contributed significantly to U.S.
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From page 35... ...
THE CASE FOR RENEWED INVESTMENT IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH 35 The intensity of the communications demands that can arise in defense applications is evident in the concept of the future battlefield as being totally dependent on communications: from the fiber-optic cores of military networks to the satellite systems that provide long-reach communications to the tactical radios carried by soldiers on the battlefield. Some of these requirements are fulfilled via commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
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From page 36... ...
Some examples of potential payoffs from telecommunications research include the following: · A significantly enhanced Internet architecture that goes beyond incremental improvements to the existing network architecture to provide enhancements such as greater trustworthiness in the network core and customer networks, improved addressing and routing, and end-to-end quality of service provisioning;3 · New network architectures that take advantage of ever-greater storage densities, processing speeds, and communications bandwidths; · More trustworthy telecommunications networks better able to address such challenges as maintaining the security of the voice network even in the face of a rising frequency, sophistication, and severity of attacks and the complexities and interdependencies that come with the convergence of voice and data networks; · Ubiquitous, higher-performance, more-affordable broadband access that enables richer, more interactive applications, including applications in such important areas as health care and education; · Telepresence and telecollaboration environments that reproduce a local space at a distance and enable spatially separated individuals or teams to work more readily in concert; · Public safety networks that offer higher mobility, better adaptation to harsh and changing conditions, and increased resiliency to damage; · Adaptive/cognitive wireless networks that enable higher-performance communications, make more efficient use of radio spectrum, and complement or supplant today's chiefly wired networks; · Location-based wireless networks that provide information and services tailored to the local environment; · Self-organizing sensor networks that have large numbers of nodes, are energy efficient, and have self-organizing capabilities, which would enable ubiquitous, cheap monitoring of the environment and weather, sensing of biological or chemical agents, and monitoring of facilities; and · New semiconductor devices that enable higher performance and new forms of communications and computing. The section that follows discusses several broad research areas in more detail.
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From page 37... ...
Telecommunications vendors are able to make incremental improvements within existing frameworks, but major advances in system architecture or services may be more difficult, and innovation in services and applications may become constrained by continued reliance on obsolete network architectures. Also, what solutions are developed and deployed may be unnecessarily complex, fragile, and vulnerable because of too little investment in architectural work.
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38 RENEWING U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH and more bandwidth out of each fiber.
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Devices and services for personal computing, mobile Internet use, and a plethora of other applications that will leverage these emerging capabilities will also bring more complexity into the core and edges of the network -- and thus new challenges to ensuring security and reliability. Public data networks have been built and the number of network providers -- including 30 major Internet backbone providers and thousands of Internet service providers -- has increased at an unprecedented rate.
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40 RENEWING U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH ability.
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THE CASE FOR RENEWED INVESTMENT IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH 41 These examples illustrate notable instances of research breakthroughs having enabled a technology capability that has, in turn, led to U.S. intellectual leadership in that area.
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42 RENEWING U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH communications has extended to the military space, and at the same time a host of fundamental telecommunications technologies were developed to meet military needs.
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From page 43... ...
Although the committee is unaware of systematically collected data on this point, anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of telecommunications industry leaders developed in this way is quite large. With fewer research opportunities available in industry today, it is more difficult for new graduates to find opportunities to mature as researchers.
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From page 44... ...
In addition, as academic and industry research opportunities in the United States begin to lag those in other countries, foreign students who are studying in the United States will be more likely to return to their home countries and participate in the creation of telecommunication networks and services of the future there rather than in the United States. The solution is for the United States to continue to innovate and ensure adequate research support and research opportunities, especially for younger researchers.
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