Weekend Post:
Virtual Nics will be replaced with Virtual Wireless Nics

Imagine, where you walk into a coffee shop and connect to all the wireless networks. Or at your home, you setup separate SSID’s for you and your kids. What is the advantage to this? If you are in the coffee shop, the computer would self optimize to use the fastest route for any connection, or use multiple connections for faster downloads. The idea isn’t to just use multiple antennas and multiple base stations it is to use software driven technology. The laptop card could have a software driven card, where it would dynamically adjust for the band and style of connection. If you wanted to connect to your bluetooth phone or camera, or 802.11 or wimax. With software radio technology it would adjust automatically for your needs.

For the home, imagine a hand held phone, that floats from land phone to voip to wireless. This technology isn’t far off except that right now it requires multiple hard coded antennas. With a software antenna it could float between bans, and test other bans without dropping the connection.

Now with a corporate setting, such as a school, the standard wireless networks could be controlled by a single server, and software driven base stations. These stations would broadcast multiple SSID’s and allocate bandwidth as needed for the current load. When the students go home it could float the antenna power to the teacher SSID’s.

This diagram illustrates how virtualization could take advantage of this technology. By allowing each virtual machine to have it’s own wireless network could allowing for an amazing web equipment tester. Want to test out a wireless router with 15 clients? 100 clients? easy, just boot up all the virtual machines and run the test suite. Want to run your mac system and connect to your apple hotspot, and then connect your pc to a near by pc on a ad-hoc network? With virtual nics it will be possible.

Right now general virtualization “virtualizes” a standard Ethernet card. For this to work you would need to have the virtual machine have the virtual drivers on there for the device, but this isn’t too difficult we will start to see an range of devices require special alterations to the virtual machines to work.

For a medium sized business you could setup a secure terminal server. Each workstation would have a dedicated secure connection with a high speed wireless. This concept is more inline with the blade model, but it could be deployed on a virtual infrastructure easily.

The future of software-defined radio is huge. As we begin to use more and more bandwidths to cover our needs, having devices which can float around between digits would increase stability and usability. What will the future bring?

Sources:
http://www.gnu.org//
http://www.newscientist.com/
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/
http://www.makezine.com/

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