Subject: [NEXTEL-1] IEEE Standard for 4G to be Fixed by 2005

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 21:41:50 -0400

IEEE Standard for 4G to be Fixed by 2005 

By David Manners -- Electronics Weekly, 6/18/2003

Standards body the IEEE is expecting to have the standard for 4G in place by the
end of next year, despite the delays and uncertainties associated with the
commercial rollout of 3G.

The IEEE standard for 4G -- 802.20 -- will be fixed by the end of next year and
will support data rates up to 4Mbit/sec. with frequencies up to 3.5GHz, according
to Rudy Lauwereins, VP of IMEC (International Microelectronics Center) at Leuven,
Belgium.

The 4G standard will allow cell-phones to operate from vehicles traveling at up to
250km/hr, and could be based on OFDM, CDMA and multi-antenna techniques.

Lauwereins told the Nepcon Design Conference, organized by Electronics Weekly,
that the industry need a "system of systems" connecting wireless and wireline
telephony with Wi-Fi and satellite communications. "We need a flexible air
interface," he said, in order to facilitate seamless hand-overs between different
access technologies and to avoid the need to carry around several terminals each
complying with different standards.
"You have only 100ms for the arrival time of packets but you can't do a handover
in 100ms using the 'break before make' method," Lauwereins said. "A 'make before
break' soft handover allows it to happen in 100ms."
He expects it will take five years for the market to introduce a flexible air
interface and that the interfaces will eventually be wearable. "We can do it now,
but we can't do it with low enough power and it wouldn't be flexible enough and
there'd be problems with the quality of service," Lauwereins said.

For handovers between Wi-Fi and wireless phone calls, Lauwereins expects a product
to be on the market by the end of this year. "It will have two different digital
parts and two different RF parts and a MAC allowing you to switch from one to the
other," Lauwereins said. It will come in the form of a PCMCIA card.

http://www.e-insite.net/electronicnews/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA305991&stt=000&industryid=21376&industry=Wireless

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