By now, “Here Are Some Stupid Things on the Internet of Things” has become a full-on article genre. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to the idea: “We Put a Chip in It,” it’s called.
In some visions of the future, smart devices capture, quantify, and control most aspects of daily life. The ovenknows you forgot about your cookies and cools them off for you at peak crisped-edginess. The fan knows you have entered the room and desire a breeze. The pillow knows when you start snoring and vibrates so you shift in your sleep. Alexa can order you one! OK, Google?
Here’s the thing, though: For those chips in those devices to do any good, they have to communicate with the outside world, and the outside world has to talk back. And—like most communications magic—that often happens via radio waves.
The increasing number of smart objects on Earth (in addition to higher-power and longer-range WiFi-beaming satellites, car radars, and ubiquitous cell coverage) causes problems for scientists who want to look beyond our planet: Astronomers are finding it harder and harder to detect faint radio signals from space, which sometimes come in on the same frequencies as human technology. Scientists, industry, and the government are trying to share a spectrum so crowded many call it a crisis.
Right now, the FCC regulates the use of the radio spectrum. And it saves some “bands”, or ranges of frequencies, mostly for radio astronomy. Around 1,400 megahertz, for example, astronomers can fairly safely look for neutral hydrogen. A bit higher, near 1,600 megahertz, the FCC has protections for hydroxyl observations. In fully protected bands, like hydrogen’s, no one else—not a smart toothbrush maker or a cell phone provider—can broadcast at those frequencies.
The rest of the FCC-allocated spectrum is split among 29 other services, like “broadcasting,” “amateur,” “mobile,” and “meteorological aids.” Not all technologies require licenses to use specific frequencies (including many Internet of Things things). But within some of the FCC’s slices, companies do vie for specific sections. Cell providers, for instance, paid more than $19 billion earlier this year for 84 megahertz of bandwidth that television broadcasters used to use.
And that b$g number should tell you something: Those slices are precious. It’s simple supply and demand. Which means those wedges reserved exclusively for radio astronomy? Someone would really like to use them to make money.
Protected Bands Is a Good Band Name
Because this is academia, there’s a committee for that: the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Radio Frequencies (CORF!). And on July 1, astronomer Liese vanZee will become its new head, leading the group of scientists who (try to) help guide the government’s—and the world’s—allocation of radio resources so scientists can study galaxies without confiscating your Samsung Galaxy.
VanZee’s research mostly uses one of the ultra-protected bands—around frequencies of 1,420 megahertz, where cosmic hydrogen beams out its emissions. So she’s got a lot less to worry about, personally, than some radio astronomers who study the complex organic molecules that send emit at the same frequency as anticollision radar. Still, even in vanZee’s supposedly science-only section of spectrum, problems pop up. “It doesn’t prevent people from deciding to broadcast there,” she says. That often happens unintentionally, in the form of “harmonics,” or accidental overtones with frequencies exactly 2, 3, 4, etc. times higher than intended one.
In preparation for an upcoming meeting of the World Radiocommunication Conference, vanZee’s committee will provide input to attending leaders on some “new” spectrum between 275 and 450 gigahertz. With the lower frequencies so crowded, people are pushing higher (even though the technology to do that isn’t mature), and moving into previously un-allocated spectrum.
But there’s a big problem: A brand-new, billion-dollar telescope in Chile—the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA—just opened its eyes a few years ago, staring into space in that radio range. “If you want to study molecules in our atmosphere or other parts of our galaxy or other galaxies, that’s a part of the spectrum you want to be using,” says vanZee. If a bunch of communications types start broadcasting all up in there, that billion-dollar instrument won’t be able to do its job.
Now, vanZee isn’t saying everyone except astronomers should become luddites to save astronomy. “It’s really tempting for the science community to put their foot down and say, ‘No no no,’” she says. “But, in fact, we do want to work with industry.”
Both sides can work to minimize head butting: Astronomers can keep building their radio telescopes in the world’s wilds, far from the hordes of Blueteeth and cell towers and Teslas. And they can build “interferometers”—sets of smaller telescopes that work together as one, which help astronomers distinguish between terrestrial and celestial signals—instead of standalone dishes.
For industry’s part, it can say “sorry” when it creates harmonics, and then fix them. That’s good for everyone. “You’re wasting energy if you’re transmitting outside of your band,” vanZee says. And the FCC could give both sides more leeway: Put some blank space between astronomy’s sacred bands and the communication bands, so industry can be a little sloppy without obscuring the universe.
The Upgraded Model
That’s still an old way of thinking about things, though, says Darpa—the defense research agency that brought you this crawling jellyfish donut robot. “Allocating” the spectrum? So rigid, so passé. The way forward is not to tell radio-emitters exactly what to do, but to liberate them, let them decide for themselves.
The old model worked relatively well for more than a century. But it’s no longer practical, in Darpa’s opinion, to have devices that operate at a set, static frequency. This is the basis of the agency’s new Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (similar to a challenge from a few years ago): Outsiders create devices that can choose, on the fly, what frequency range will work best at that moment, based on the broadcasting characteristics of other nearby devices—including those that are also flipping between frequencies.
“If we want to eliminate the inefficiencies that exist today,” says Paul Tilghman, head of the challenge, “we want to manage the spectrum at machine speeds, not people speeds.” Thirty teams, selected in January, are now preparing for the first “tournament” in December, where their radio-broadcasters will battle-of-the-bots it out.
The military, and so Darpa, is interested in this because its many “unmanned platforms”—drones in the water and the air, satellites in orbit—need consistent, uninterrupted communications. But whatever comes out of the competition can make its way into industry, too. Into your toothbrush that tells you if your teeth are clean!
Super-smart broadcasters like that could be both good and bad news for radio astronomy. The good news: The algorithms that help the machines figure out which frequencies to use can easily include things like a “never use 1,420 megahertz.”
The bad news: When astronomers want to know if a signal comes from space, they sometimes depend on knowing what a given source of human-made radio waves looks like. “Yes, that’s definitely the neighbors’ iRobot,” they may be able to say. But not if iRobot is always changing.
The important thing, however radio use evolves, is to share, smartly, and to talk it all through first. Because as cool as it is to communicate at home, doing so irresponsibly could cut humans off from space. “If you fill the spectrum with man-made emissions, you will never be able to understand certain parts of the universe,” says vanZee.
Source: http://bit.ly/2tq0NRh
