The tether-free world and wireless technology

Summary form only given. This article discuss planned initiatives by the Directorate for Engineering of the National Science Foundation addressing the "tether-free world and wireless technology." Wireless technology breaks the physical tethers that support our current communications infrastructure. As one envisions a tether-free world of the future: one sees the monitoring and control of processes being done from anywhere, seamless information transmission and reception from anywhere to anywhere, work and personal tasks being done anywhere, materials, structures, vehicles, and even humans, signaling when they need attention. It is expected that this research initiative will result in non-traditional approaches, and applications that will leap-frog current wireless technology to a much broader concept of the tether-free environment. One envisions future generations of wireless technology will shift to broadband techniques along with a shift from current voice dominated wireless systems to information dominated wireless systems.