One of the most familiar features of radio communication over walkie-talkies, wireless radios and air traffic controllers is the punctuation of their speeches with an “over” which indicates that the second person can now speak. This is because of a handicap that has constrained radio communication ever since its invention, the inability of radio traffic to simultaneously move in two different directions on one frequency.
Researchers at Stanford, however, seem to have removed this ages old incapability from radios as the prototypes of radio communication equipment recently designed at the university have the ability to receive and send signals at the same time. This means that these models are automatically two times faster than the existing ones and after a few tweaks and changes they will very likely be rendered even more efficient and user-friendly for future networks.
Three of the university’s graduate students from the electrical engineering wing, Jung Il Choi, Kannan Srinivasan and Mayank Jain came up with this apparently simplistic idea of replicating the working of our brains during human conversations, which screen out our own voices, and then started working towards realizing it. Most wireless networks work with individual devices taking turns in relaying their messages to the other. The students, after several months of trying to work out a way through this barrier, came up with a solution with the help of their Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering.
The prototype was demonstrated by these students at the MobiCom 2010 held in fall last year. The conference, which includes representation from 500 of the top mobile networking experts of the world, awarded these researchers with the best demonstration award which speaks volumes about the importance of their achievement. No one before that point of time had ever thought that two way radio communications could be achieved.
