Packet radio technology, originally developed by DARPA due to its clear benefits for the military, today has the potential for wide-spread adoption by a variety of commercial markets. Such commercial nomadic routers, which we call Internet Radios, promise to offer a new and unique set of capabilities for regional- and campus-area networks: self-managing peer-to-peer communication with rapid, wireless deployment, no service fees, automatic adaptation to dynamics, seamless extension of the Internet, and automatic extension of network coverage as new radios are added. However, two factors stand-out as impediments to commercial adoption (but as less critical for Government R&D): cost and "ease -of-use." Largely due to the increasing digitization of radios, we expect the Internet Radio cost to decrease rapidly during the coming few years. Therefore, the focus of this project, Simple Internet Radios for Instant Tele-Networks (SPIRIT), is on ease-of-use. In fact, because it requires no wiring, no third party wireless service provider, and no configuration of internal network routing, the Internet Radio has the unique potential to be the most easily installed and operated networking technology available. Thus, the goal of SPIRIT is to introduce the technology needed for the future Internet Radio user to simply unplug and play!
