2012年7月31日星期二

Machine chatter transforming mobile systems


Ocado, an online grocery store in England, prides itself on its delivery of refrigerated foods. When the company says the goods will arrive at a certain temperature, it means it.The promise is more than a marketing boast. Aided by chip transmitters, heat sensors and a fast-growing form of wireless communication, the boast is a measurable fact.A SIM-card module the size of a postage stamp monitors the air temperature inside each Ocado delivery van. The sensor sends data every few minutes to a computer used by fleet managers at the company's headquarters near London.Ocado says incidents of spoilage have declined since the transmitters were installed last year.
"It has saved us time and given us more confidence in our real-time monitoring, as well as being a safety check for the driver," said Paul Clarke, Ocado's director of technology, who oversees a 300-person department that develops software and hardware for the retailer.Is Ryder System's Cash Machine Slowing Down?The drone of low-density conversation between Ocado's trucks and headquarters in Hatfield, England, is one example of machine-to-machine communication, a stream of consciousness based on semiconductors that is poised to reinvigorate the mobile industry.Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenburg, Sweden, says the number of machine-to-machine devices using the world's wireless networks reached 108 million in 2011 and will at least triple that by 2017.
Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, sees as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020. Only 10 billion or so are likely to be mobile phones and tablet computers. The rest will be machines, talking not to us, but to each other.The level of robotic chatter on the world's wireless networks — measured in the data load they exert on networks — is soon likely to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations taking place on wireless grids."I would say that is definitely possible within 10 years," said Miguel Blockstrand, the director of Ericsson's machine-to-machine division in Stockholm. "This is a 'what if?' kind of technology. People start to consider the potential, and the possibilities are endless."
Machine-to-machine communication has been around for more than two decades, initially run on landlines and used for controlling industrial processes remotely. With advances in mobile broadband speeds and smartphone computing, the same robotic conversations are now rapidly shifting to wireless networks.When the total amount of data traffic generated by machines overtakes that of human voice conversations — or possibly before — mobile operators will have to choose who waits in line to make a call or receive an email — the machine or the human.

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