Topics pursued

Various topics of particular interest where I’ve pulled together a variety of resources. When there’s a critical mass, I link to such a topic here.

Group-forming networks

Networks that grow partly or entirely structured around the formation and maintanence of groups fascinate me, because they lie at the intersection of social behavior, networks of networks like the Internet, and various graph theoretic ideas. One result was discovering that scaling of mutual value in such networks is exponential rather than polynomial, which I formulated as Reed’s Law.

Open Spectrum

After exploring some ideas that I encountered at Interval Research, I became fascinated with the question of how the communications capacity of wireless networks in a fixed region of space might be limited by fundamental limits of information theory and physics. This became a project for me starting in 1996, leading to a first realization is that the answer was not known (and remains unknown). However the second realization was more surprising after I investigated more deeply the information theory of multiple-input, multiple-output channels, and the fundamental physics of electromagnetic waves. That realization was that the limit grows as the number of transceivers in a fixed space grows. This completely upended the understanding of radio communications that had been taught to us, as well as upending the validity of the worldwide regulatory framework, which is based on a concept invented by Marconi called syntonic multiplexing for allowing multiple morse-code (CW) transmissions to co-exist without “interference”.