Wi-Fi: Who Says You Can't Take It With You?Wi-Fi: Who Says You Can't Take It With You?

Colorado Springs, Colo. — Zeewaves Systems Inc., a startup here working with Nvidia Corp. on planar-antenna Wi-Fi designs, has developed a mobile Wi-Fi architecture that can combine vehicular hotspots with such functions as global-positioning system, automatic vehicle location and ZigBee sensor gateways. Zeewaves is offering ConnectStar, a commercial version of the system, and has defined an extended architecture for government security applications called On-board Communication, Automated Tracking and Surveillance Systems (OCATSS).

Khurshid Qureshi, Zeewaves' president and chief executive officer, said that the original architecture was based on a customer premises system intended to link WiMax fixed-wireless broadband backbones to local Wi-Fi services. Because WiMax seemed to be years away from ubiquity, the Zeewaves design team elected to use the same integrated antenna and gateway architecture to design a vehicle-based system that would establish Wi-Fi hotspots over 3G or CDMA cellular backbones.

"We could have taken the components to the radio industry and let them drive the design concepts, but it didn't seem as though they had many concepts integrating Wi-Fi that they were pushing," Qureshi said. "So we decided to develop the core architecture ourselves, and let them join in as network services were defined."

In tests driving around Colorado Springs, broadband connectivity was maintained while the host car was at freeway speeds, though occasional delay was experienced as network requests were handed off. Qureshi said that he wouldn't predict such a system could eliminate emerging mobile wireless standards like 802.20, though ConnectStar's ability to provide practical Wi-Fi service in a mobile environment makes 802.11 derivatives appear feasible for mobile environments.

Qureshi hired Jim Hinsey, founder of a small security startup called General Surveillance Inc., as Zeewaves' director of global services, to look at ways to bring bomb-sensor and video-surveillance networks into the ConnectStar topology. In early July, the first generation of an OCATSS architecture demonstrated integration of Wi-Fi, AVL and GPS with 911 services, remote video surveillance, and fire- and bomb-sniffing sensors.

The Zeewaves team had intended to offer the system to local police and fire first responders, although last month's bombings in London changed the focus. "We really were concerned, following the July 7 bomb attacks, that introducing the OCATSS architecture could look very opportunistic. We did not want to capitalize on tragedy," Qureshi said. "Then an investor told us that integrated communication services for anti-terror could save lives, and that's all that matters."

In its early instantiation, OCATSS has been promoted to local emergency teams trying to upgrade proprietary police radio and data networks to Wi-Fi and 3G, though Zeewaves also intends to show the system to the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation and European agencies. The ability to augment OCATSS with WiMax ports and cargo container sensors could give the system a role in ports and transportation hubs. The underlying baseband, RF and antenna hardware currently is implemented in a 6 x 6-inch footprint, which will soon be shrunk to 4 inches square.

Hinsey said that his own work at General Surveillance mapped well into the Zeewaves security software architecture, in which bulk encryption and antenna directional security are combined with two-layer authentication at the physical and packet layers. Lower-layer security makes more sense for embedded industrial and transportation networks, Hinsey said, and the arrival of an Advanced Encryption Standard version of Wi-Fi Protected Access should eliminate any need for transport-layer security.

The missing piece in such networks is ensuring that quality-of-service parameters are sufficient so that emergency services can always get through the local Wi-Fi and backbone 3G portions of the network. Hinsey currently is working on extending QoS concepts from traditional data and voice-over-Internet Protocol networks to sensor networks, including ones used by robotic autonomous vehicles.

"In theory, this could eliminate the need for proprietary satellite networks in vehicular tracking," Qureshi said. "We'll be talking to many of the large transportation companies, both in service and vehicle areas, in the next few weeks."

Zeewaves plans to work with OEMs and service partners on custom configurations of the ConnectStar or OCATSS versions of the system.