[802.19] Analysis of the complete and incremental proposals
Greeting, everyone,
Taking Mika up on his offer to use the reflector, I would like to thank the folks at NICT for posting a rather detailed rebuttle to Joe's and my presentation for an incremental process - although I did find it rather discouraging that they found quite little to agree with us on :-)
Please reference the contribution they've made, which I linked below for convenience:
https://mentor.ieee.org/802.19/dcn/10/19-10-0025-00-0000-more-detailed-comparison-of-the-complete-proposal-and-incremental-proposal-approaches.pdf
Rather then post yet another contribution, I would like to highlight a few points which I feel their analysis misses - and which were the main reason for suggesting the incremental. To do so I would like to start by agreeing with NICT (and others) that the incremental process appears to be so much more cumbersome then the "complete proposal" approach.
So what in the world could have possessed us to propose an incremental approach? Quite simply, it is the experience in several other standardization processes within 802. Of these the best known (but neither the only not the worst) is 802.11n which lasted for a better part of the decade. The reason for this is the existence of several competing full proposals and the exhorbitant amount of time spent merging them. Given that the only approval vote that could be taken was for a full proposal the group simply could not move forward until the merge occured. What's worse, such a merging process typically has to happen in the background - i.e. outside the open standardization process.
To this we contrast the process in 802.16m - which, BTW, though nominally an amendment to 802.16 is in fact a completely new air interface proposal to ITM Advanced. Thus, it is arguably much more extensive in scope then our own project (it defines a brand new PHY and MAC). Yes, the progress there has been slow - but it has been steady. Critically, the group has been meeting all schedules associated with IMT-Advanced - a feat in itself for any SDO. Yes, their experience would indicate that the timeline we have is perhaps too aggresive for an incremental proposal - but perhaps that is an indication that our timeline is just aggressive???
In summary, I would pose the question as such - do we want put in place a process that allows us to keep moving forward at all times, meeting-by-meeting, at a cost of some potential delay? Or do we want to try and go for a one-shot deal and hope that 26% of the voters do not find a minor detail in the one-shot deal that is so egregiously disagreeable that they just can't stomach it? I (obviously!) prefer the former and given that, do not much care what the detailed steps are that allow us to implement it.
Look forward to discussing this further on the call tonight,
Alex