IEEE expects WiMAX 2 standardization by summer

By : BP Tiwari



The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is expected this summer to provide final approval for the 802.16m standard, also known as "WiMAX 2."

Two operators who are bullish for 16m are clearwire and Yota. U.S. ISP Clearwire, currently the largest company to offer commercial WiMAX services in the United States, has said it plans on testing out 802.16m sometime next year in the hopes of deploying it in 2012.

So what do we know about this WiMAX sequel? Well for one, it will be backward compatible with 802.16e, the WiMAX standard currently used by operators in the United States. This means that when Clearwire upgrades to the new standard it will be able to do so at a relatively low cost and with minimal additional cost of up gradation and service disruption. I heard that most of the currently deployed WiMAX Base Stations can be upgraded to WiMAX 2 with new higher capacity channel cards and new softwares. But there is something which is little tricky here, If a 2X2 MIMO systems are upgraded to WiMAX2 the performance advantage would not be very much. With 16e systems we are already reaching Shannon’s limit in peak data rates. Operators need to upgrade to their current 2x2 MIMO systems to 4x2 systems to achieve higher spectral efficiency in similar amount of channel. One of the major improvements in MIMO technologies is the support of Multi User MIMO in WiMAX 2. “Multi-user MIMO can leverage multiple users as spatially distributed transmission resources, at the cost of somewhat more expensive signal processing. In comparison, conventional, or single-user MIMO considers only local device multiple antenna dimensions. Multi-user MIMO algorithms are developed to enhance MIMO systems when the number of users, or connections, numbers greater than on “

The WiMAX Forum is working on an 802.16m certification profile for developers that it hopes to have up and running by the time IEEE finalizes the standard in September. If all goes according to plan, we should start to see WiMAX 2 devices hit the market one year later.

Please note that I have also blogged about Korea’s leading electronics maker and the central government-financed research institute succeeded in demonstrating the newest and fastest version of wireless mobile Internet technology

Reporting from the infrastructures suppliers front, Samsung Electronics and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, or ETRI, released a joint statement in august, saying that they demonstrated Mobile WiMAX Evolution at the JW Marriott Hotel, Banpo-dong, southern Seoul in the presence of members of the Radio communication Sector, a division of the International Telecommunication Union. Samsung in a joint press release claimed peak speed of 149 mbps in downlink /49 mbps in uplink in 20 MHz TDD based system. The peak mobile data rate were 50 mbps in downlink and 11 mbps in uplink.

Motorola, Huawei and ZTE are actively participating in 16m working groups and has readmap to support 16m based systems in 9-12 months after standardization. In all aspects migration of 16m would not be a one time upgrade but a step by step procedure. I expect that multicarrier and support of 20 MHz channels would come first , followed by support of downlink 4 stream ( MU-MIMO ) , multicarrier binding and interference collaboration in control and data plane.

Clearwire, notably deployed 4TRX systems from Huawei in Seattle and other cities which would be easily upgradable to a 4X2 16m systems using new channel cards and software’s.

With the new technology, mobile phone users can get faster access to mobile Internet at comparable speeds to Web surfing on a home computer.

Thanks, BP
www.beyond4g.org