Report of IEEE 802.16m Meeting -Session #62 on 13-16 July 2009 in San Francisco, CA

Most notably, the IEEE 802/16 Working Group met a major milestone by agreeing to open a letter ballot on the first draft (P802.16m/D1) under the 802.16m project. The 16m Task Group will issue a request for input on specific technical topics (LBS, E-MBS, Relay, and SON- see below for acronym definitions), to be submitted prior to Session #63 in Jeju, Korea and discussed at Session #63.5 on the big island of Hawaii.

The IEEE 802.16 Session #62 Report summarizes the outcomes:

http://ieee802.org/16/meetings/mtg62/report.html

From Jose Puthenkulam, IEEE 802.16 Vice Chair:

The important news items are:

– The first IEEE 802.16m Draft Standard (D1) will be issued shortly, before August 1st.

– The 802.16 Working Group Letter Ballot on the IEEE 802.16m Draft Standard will start soon after.

– A lot of contributions (60) on 802.16m Femto-cells were submitted last week. Work on Femtocells will continue throughout the letter ballot phase.

– Also optional features like Enhanced Location Based Services (LBS), Enhanced Multicast-Broadcast Services (EMBS), Integrated Relay and Self Organizing Networks (SON) will start being developed soon.

– The IMT-Advanced Proposal development also progressed very well. The complete proposal will be ready by mid September and finalized by the Sept 21-24 Hawaii meeting.

– IEEE 802.16m Systems are expected to deliver performance >300Mbps in 4×4 MIMO configurations using 20MHz channels

From Siavash Alamouti, CTO of Intel’s Mobile Wireless Group – on IEEE 802.16m capabilities in the 2010-2011 timeframe:

-Peak sector throughput over 300 Mbps Downlink* (in a 20 MHz channel)
-TDD & FDD support
-Multi-carrier support; BW of up to 100 MHz
-Increased VoIP capacity
-Even lower link access latencies
-Enhanced coverage
-Enhanced multi-radio coexistence and inter-technology handover
-Integrated multi-hop relay
-Self-organizing base stations
-Increased mobility: Up to 350 km/hr*

*Note: Actual mobility & throughput depends on environmental conditions and Service Provider provisioning. Aggregate peak sector throughput calculated using 20 MHz channel for Downlink.

References for IEEE 802.16m:

http://www.wimax360.com/profiles/blogs/4g-myth-busting-intels-march

http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/comsoc/Talk_032509_WiMAXUpdate.pdf

Observation: It appears that IEEE 802.16m is a lot closer to standardization then 3GPP’s LTE Advanced. If so, it is likely to be implemented sooner – assuming IEEE 802.16e (Mobile WiMAX) is a commercial success.

Alan J Weissberger

IEEE ComSoc SCV Program Chair and Vice Chair