System design issues for low-power, low-cost short range wireless networking

The emergence of battery powered handheld devices as popular computing devices is presenting new challenges. Among the most important challenges is the need to provide a low cost, low power, indoor wireless networking access to handheld devices. The constraints posed by battery power and cost require a careful re-evaluation of system design issues at all layers of the protocol stack. We present the design of a short range wireless networking system called BlueSky which is being developed at IBM Research to address these challenges. We show that the optimization objectives for short range indoor wireless systems are quite different from those for traditional cellular wireless systems. We also argue that in the next millennium the primary optimization criteria for the design of (short range) wireless systems will shift from the traditional spectral efficiency towards battery lifetime and cost.