Mobile phones and the wireless networks they depend on to provide you with talk, text, and data, typically have no problems working for people who are sitting at a fixed location for long periods of time. It’s when you start moving around however that things start to get tricky. Handsets have to do something called a “hand off“, which is another way of saying disconnecting from the cell tower your device currently attached to and then hooking up with the next available tower in order to provide you a seamless experience. Researchers at MIT have figured out that if one were to use the GPS chip inside most smartphones today to talk to WiFi access points about where a user is right now and the trajectory they’re on, data throughput can be increased by 50%.
It takes four protocols to make this work. The first, as described above, records not only your present location, but also where you intend to go. This is used to avoid connecting to a WiFi access point that you’re likely to walk away from. The second allows a smartphone to know how much capacity a certain access point has so as to prevent your handset from blasting the hotspot with too much data or opting to go with a lower data rate, wasting capacity that could have otherwise been better utilized. The third works on the access point side. Most hotspots typically try sending data over and over again to a device long after it’s disconnected. Not anymore, this new protocol tells a hotspot that “ok, they’re gone now, stop trying to feed them bits”. The fourth and final protocol deals with cars and how to best route data to them and between them, which will be useful at some point in the future when computers are behind the wheel.
Will this stuff come to cellular technology? It should, but don’t get your hopes up. The folks that make these standards, the 3GPP, are busy enough as is with trying to finish LTE-Advanced.
[Picture unrelated, it does look cool though, doesn’t it?