Portable devices' built-in motion sensors improve data rates on wireless networks
For most of the 20th century, the paradigm of wireless communication was a radio station with a single high-power transmitter. As long as you were within 20 miles or so of the transmitter, you could pick up the station. With the advent of cell phones, however, and even more so with Wi-Fi, the paradigm became a large number of scattered transmitters with limited range. When a user moves out of one transmitter's range and into another's, the network has to perform a "handoff." And as anyone who's lost a cell-phone call in a moving car or lost a Wi-Fi connection while walking to the bus stop can attest, handoffs don't always happen as they should. Researchers have now developed new protocols that can often, for users moving around, improve network throughput (the amount of information that devices could send and receive in a given period) by about 50 percent.