Nikkei Electronics Asia -- May 2008
Reports
NICT: We Compete to Win

At the end of 2007, a significant report was presented in the IEEE802.15.3c group handling transmission standards for millimeter wave communications within the IEEE802 Committee: a system proposed by a consortium of mostly Japanese firms was adopted as the basic approach for the transmission standard. The consortium was established and guided to success by Shuzo Kato, program director, New Generation Wireless Communications Research Center, National Institute of Information & Communications Technology (NICT). Here, Kato provides a number of hints on how to succeed in standardization.

A system proposed by a group of primarily Japanese firms was adopted as the basic approach for the millimeter-wave communication standard by the IEEE802 Committee. It was approved by 87% in balloting at the standardization meeting. Why such a solid show of support?

I don't think there's much point in competing unless you're determined to win, and if you're the leader of a project you simply cannot afford to lose. When I was appointed program director for NICT at the end of 2005, my first task was to establish an organizational stance that would win at standardization. The organization was a consortium called CoMPA (Consortium of Millimeter-wave Practical Applications), and was formed around a core of NICT and about 20 firms including Sony Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, both of Japan. The objective was to make a broad technical proposal by incorporating a number of companies. I wanted to bring a comprehensive solution to the standardization competition, including not only the transmission system, but the total package.

The group deciding the millimeter-wave communication method, IEEE802.15.3c, had to discuss three key points, namely the system (the transmission system itself), the usage model (defining various usage scenarios) and the channel model (a model of millimeter wave transmission). CoMPA responded by forming six internal but independent working groups, developing technical proposals for everything. We had to, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to answer all those probing questions from rival groups looking for holes in our proposal. When undecided votes saw that we had all our ducks in a row, and could answer technical questions on the spot, they decided to support our proposal. 

The classic situation within the IEEE802 Committee is where there are multiple technical proposals competing with each other, all reasonable ones, and discussion gets stuck in a rut. This makes it tough to gain the minimum 75% needed to narrow it down to a single proposal.

We developed a framework for our technical proposal specifically to avoid falling into this type of situation, by preparing compromise proposals in advance for technical proposals we expected to be competing with. For example, our proposal is based on using a single carrier for millimeter-wave transmission, but Intel Corp of the US and some other firms have already proposed a method using multiple carriers via orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM). In response, we incorporated a mode for minimal communication through both single-carrier and ODFM. I think this approach was crucial in garnering support in the standardization process.

After working many years at Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp (NTT) of Japan, you spent some years, mostly in the US, establishing your consulting company, among other things. So why did you decide to take a job as program director at NICT?

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