[Wireless Japan] IEEE to Certify Over-Gbps Wireless Communication Standard

Jul 23, 2009 11:44 Hiroki Yomogita, Nikkei Electronics

A millimeter-wave communication standard originated from Japan will become an IEEE standard before long.

The physical layer standard, "IEEE802.15.3c," has been promoted by 39 organizations, including NICT (Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), NTT Corp, NEC Corp, Panasonic Corp, Sony Corp and IBM Corp. It can realize a high-speed wireless interface of more than 1Gbps with home audio-visual equipment, PCs, mobile phones and so on.

The IEEE802.15.3c will be certified by the upper members of the IEEE in September 2009 at the earliest, Shuzo Kato, a program coordinator of NICT announced in his speech at Wireless Japan 2009, which is taking place from July 22 to 24, 2009, at Tokyo Big Sight.

Specifications of both single carrier, OFDM

The IEEE802.15.3c assumes a physical layer that can realize a data transmission speed of more than 5Gbps by using the 60GHz band. It started to be standardized in March 2005. And Japanese manufactures established the COMPA (Consortium for Millimeter-wave Practical Applications), which is led by NICT, and have since suggested technologies for the standard.

Currently, 39 companies (including research institutes) are affiliated with the COMPA. They are 22 corporate members including the US firms and 17 partner companies from outside Japan.

In the IEEE802.15.3c, data is transmitted by using multiple channels with a frequency bandwidth of 2160MHz in the band ranging from 57 to 66GHz. The standard includes the specifications of both single carrier and OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing).

For example, when a single carrier is used, a data transmission speed of up to 3Gbps can be ensured by using QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) as a primary modulation method and Reed-Solomon codes for error correction.

When 16-value QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) and LDPC (low density parity check codes) are combined, the transmission rate can be as high as 5.2Gbps. Furthermore, when OFDM is used, the speed can exceed 6Gbps by combining 64-value QAM, Reed-Solomon codes and LDPC.

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