N-WEST News #27
National Wireless Electronic Systems Testbed (N-WEST)

20 September 2000

Topics:

IEEE 802.16 PROGRESSES IN SESSION #9

Session #9 of the IEEE Working Group 802.16 on Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) Standards took place 11-15 September 2000 in Denver, Colorado, USA. In a session marked by broad new consensus, all of the four 802.16 groups made major progress and the Working Group as a whole rallied around a single medium access control (MAC) standard. For details, please see the Session #9 Report. The session was held in conjunction with RAWCON2000 (see below).

RAWCON2000 LEADS INTERDISCIPLINARY WIRELESS APPROACH

The 2000 IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference (RAWCON2000), co-sponsored by NIST for the fifth time, again brought a large multinational crowd to Denver, Colorado on September 10-13. RAWCON continued to forge new ground in the interdisciplinary areas of wireless communications. Several hundred people enjoyed a technical program of 65 oral and poster papers. Al Javed, Chief Technology Officer for Access at Nortel Networks, provided the Keynote, addressing Fourth Generation mobile wireless systems. The banquet speaker was Colorado's Secretary of Technology, Marc Holtzman. Workshops covered ultrawideband (UWB) communications and wireless networking, and panel sessions explored the wireless Internet and the role of universities in wireless. The influential trade magazine EE Times once again featured a cover story on RAWCON.

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ADVANCED RADIO TECHNOLOGIES (ISART)

The International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies, co-sponsored by the Institute for Telecommunications Sciences and NIST, was held in Boulder on September 6-8, 2000. This year's theme was "Broadband Wireless Technologies and Applications." The agenda and presentations are on-line. One session of particular interest took place on Friday morning:

Broadband Wireless Standards (Roger B. Marks, Chair)
Role of Standards in Advancing the Technologies for Wireless Access
Dr. José M. Costa, Nortel Networks
Enabling Broadband Wireless Through Standardization
Dr. Roger B. Marks, NIST
Standards for Multi-Protocol Air Interfaces
Ken Krechmer, ACTION Consulting
Fixed Broadband Wireless Access: Technologies and Standards
Dr. Ender Ayanoglu, Cisco Systems
Influence of Information Theory on the PTM Wireless Architecture Standard
Dr. Ron McCallister, SiCOM, Inc.
Beyond Standards: Business and Social Implications of Telecommunications Standards
Steven D. Roemerman, Incucomm, Inc.
Open Round Table
Discussion

Read about N-WEST at http://nwest.nist.gov

Dr. Roger Marks (marks@nist.gov)
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado, USA