IEEE 802 held a plenary meeting in Orlando, Florida the week of March 12th. Here are some highlights on the wireless front:

• 802.11n (High Throughput) draft 2 ballot passed but the group has received ~3000 comments to resolve and the official schedule slipped into mid-2009
• 802.11s (Wi-Fi mesh) is changing its charter to incorporate Mesh Points (mesh nodes) without AP capabilities. This will let the Wi-Fi mesh standard specify meshing of stations like police radios that may need to rout traffic, but don’t require AP functionality.
• 802.11 and 802.16 are both actively working with ITU to incorporate their standards into the IMT-2000 framework: 802.16 for mobile interface and 802.11 for nomadic interface
• >1GBps Study Group (Very High-Throughput) was formed to address the ITU-T IMT-2000 throughput requirement for the nomadic wireless interface.
• 802.11p (DSRC/WAVE) is struggling to fit its requirement for fast association/authentication into 802.11 and facing some objections from the working group regarding its proposed changes to the protocol
• 802.11p is looking at collaborating with 802.11s on a short-beacon protocol that may help 802.11p with its fast association issue. 802.11s is considering the short-beacon protocol to minimize overhead in the communications among the mesh nodes.
• 802.11v (management) is attracting a lot of attention with their work on mobile stations operation in sleep mode. The key problem to solve is letting stations in sleep mode stay associated to the network and maintain the awareness of their location even as they traverse multiple BSSs. This may be brought into the Wi-Fi Alliance to be developed in parallel with the IEEE.
• 802.11k (radio resource measurement) has been approved by the WG and is being forwarded to Sponsor Ballot.
• 802.11y (operation in the 3650-3700 MHz lightly licensed band) resolved comments and will be holding a WG ballot on whether to got to Sponsor Ballot.
• A study group to incorporate WMM into 802.11 - WMM / 11e SG – was officially formed.
• The DLS (Direct Link Setup) study group met worked on their PAR to enable direct station to station communications without repeating all the traffic through an AP. This should help double the efficiency of an 802.11 link for video transmission. DLS protocol currently exists in the 802.11e amendment, but it does not work with existing APs, which has been a barrier to deployment.

For further detail on any of the above, please contact Fanny Mlinarsky, fm@octoscope.com.

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