Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Thesis 63

The necessary wireless networking protocols already exist.

If IPv6 gives us a way to identify each of the almost unimaginably rich profusion of nodes everyware will bring into being, we still need to provide some channel by which those nodes can communicate with each other. We already have some fairly specific ideas of what such a channel should look like: Most of our visions of ubiquity presuppose a network that:

• is wireless;
• provides broadband;
• affords autodiscovery;
• is available wherever you might go.

As it happens, each of them is neatly answered by a brace of emerging (and in some cases conflicting) networking standards.

At ultra-short ...