Roy Want and Michelle Wong from Intel's Research labs each gave presentations introducing the audiences to a new solution for wireless discovery and selection of other devices. If you have ever tried to get your notebook to wirelessly find a nearby projector, or pair your Bluetooth to your mobile phone, then you know how frustrating that can be. Intel's R&D wizards have developed a different approach.

We have all had to wait for Bluetooth “pairing” from ten seconds to nearly a minute for the proper wireless resource to be found and chosen as the one to be used. This delay is because traditional wireless discovery approaches of sending a broadcast radio signal and waiting for a response are carry overs from the wired world where we used to run a cable over to a printer or projector. Next we had local area network (LAN) connections using Media Access Control address (MAC address).

Roy and Michelle showed how wireless devices using Layer 3 for Service Discovery can get lost in a multi-device layout.

There are a whole host of problems using the traditional Layer 3 approach in wireless. One of the biggest problems with the old fashioned method of Service Discovery is battery consumption. If you don't get a speedy connection often times you have to repeat the whole process multiple times.

Intel's Wizards of R&D have been burning the midnight oil working on how to do Service Discovery using Layer 2 of the OSI model. Layer 2 of the OSI model is the Data Link Layer. The Data Link Layer consists of two sublayers, the Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Logical Link Control (LLC) layer. The MAC sublayer controls how a network node gains access to the data and permission to transmit it.

MAC addresses are globally unique addresses that are written into hardware at the time of manufacture. For this reason, MAC addresses are sometimes called Burned In Addresses (BIA). After manufacture, it is possible in many cases to change the MAC address of a device in software. When you're connected to the Internet from your computer (or host as the Internet protocol thinks of it), a correspondence table relates your IP address to your computer's physical (MAC) address on the LAN.

Wouldn't it be great to have wireless devices discover each other in less than 2 seconds, instead of waiting for 30 seconds or more. After waiting all that time you often have to step in and restart the whole process all over again. By using a combination of IP and MAC addressing making almost instant connection possible.

All of this work is at the preliminary stage and not something you can buy in today's mobile phone or Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

The next step for the Intel team is to forward their research to a group for evaluation. Later this Autumn, they will be taking their ideas as open source to Moblin, Intel's open source community which is set up to develop software for MIDs, Netbooks, and embedded devices. Of course, these devices will be based on Intel's Atom Processor Technology. X