IEEE flooded with short-range wireless proposals

By Patrick Mannion
iApplianceWeb
(02/21/03, 12:11:13 PM EDT)

MANHASSET, N.Y. - The IEEE 802.15 High-Rate Task Group received 29 proposals for the alternate physical layer standard it is developing, significantly more than the eight or nine it expected to receive when it requested proposals last November. As a result, the group will be mired in over 30 hours of presentations at its next meeting in Dallas in March.

Ultrawideband (UWB) approaches are considered the leading contenders of the proposals for an alternate physical layer for the group's high-rate wireless personal-area network (WPAN) draft standard, but they are going up against a plethora of others, including narrowband, 5-GHz and up to 40-GHz proposals.

"We're blown away by the sheer number of responses, but are very excited," said Glyn Roberts, publicity committee chairman of the IEEE 802.15 Working Group. The 802.15.3a ("a" for alternate) task group will consider the proposals and is charged to come up with a physical layer (PHY) that supports data rates from 110 to 480 Mbits/second, primarily for short-range multimedia streaming. The minimum requirement is 110 Mbits/s over distances of up to 10 meters. The standard will use the same media-access control layer as the IEEE's original .15.3 PHY, which operates in the 2.4-GHz band but only supports data rates from 11 to 55 Mbits/s.

Those data rates are insufficient for multimedia streaming, said Roberts. When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission tentatively opened up spectrum last February to allow for UWB operation, the 802.15.3a effort gained momentum.

"The vast majority of proposals seem to come from UWB developers," said Roberts, manager of business research and development for the Advanced System Technology group at STMicroelectronics. STMicro was one of several well-known UWB developers to submit a proposal to IEEE, along with XtremeSpectrum, Intel, General Atomics, Discrete Time, Time Domain, Pulse-LINK, Pulsicom and Texas Instruments. The complete list of proposals can be found online.

The task group plans to have all companies that have submitted proposals to present them at its March meeting, followed by a second round of presentations in May, when the group will meet in Singapore. Then the group will "start the down-selection process at the July meeting," Roberts said, adding that he expects a lot of consolidation and/or dropouts between the March and May meetings.

Before receiving the 29 proposals, the group said it expected to publish a final standard in mid-2004. That time line may be altered given the large number of submissions.

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