Advances in wireless terminals

Current wireless terminals are limited to voice terminals such as cellular and PCS phones, and traditional laptop computers and PDAs configured with w ireless modems and network interface cards. However, the current wireless n etworks, which are by and large wireless extensions of the circuit-switched voice networks, are being replaced by emerging wireless networking technol ogies that are intrinsically designed to support packet data and multimedia services. This will lead to novel networked applications and services, whi ch in turn will require wireless terminals capable of exploiting these serv ices. What shape will these next-generation wireless terminals take? The an swer, based on the much talked about notion of ''convergence," would appear to be a marriage of the laptop or PC with a wireless phone in the same pac kage, leading to terminals such as the Nokia 9000 [1] or Bell Laboratories' wireless handset [2]. We argue that such a complex one-size-fits-all voice -data integrated wireless terminal will, at best, be a point solution. Rath er, with the availability of cheap radio and computing hardware and ubiquit ous low-cost indoor and outdoor wireless networking infrastructures, the ca pability to access a wireless network will soon be embedded into a variety of devices, gadgets, and appliances with specialized functions in our envir onment. In this article we describe the technological challenges and identi fy potential solutions in designing these myriad future "wireless terminals " that will handle diverse data types, have limited battery resources, and operate in environments that are unplanned, insecure, and time-varying, and have context-dependent services.