The WWiSE Proposal For The 802.11n Standard
by James Zyren (On behalf of the WWiSE coalition)
Conexant Systems, Inc.

In Lee Goldberg's Editorial, WAN Wars: The Summer's Hottest Spectator Sport, he invited competing standards' factions for future 802.11 applications to put forward their positions for readers to compare. First up was an OpEd piece positioning the TGn Sync group. Jim Zyren, representing WWiSE, issues that group's rationale in this week's item.

Introduction

The charter of IEEE 802.11 Task Group N (TGn) is to develop a standard that will drive WLAN throughput rates beyond 100 Mbit/s. A group of leading WLAN companies operating under the name "Worldwide Spectrum Efficiency" (WWiSE) has collaborated to develop a joint proposal for submission to TGn. Member companies are Airgo Networks, Bermai, Broadcom, Conexant, Realtek, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.

The objective of the WWiSE group is to develop a superior technical proposal that is practical to implement, compatible with legacy 802.11a and 802.11g equipment, and suitable for worldwide deployment. A key element of the WWiSE proposal is compliance with the requirements of all major regulatory domains. In addition, if the WWiSE proposal is adopted as the 802.11n Standard, each member company has agreed to make essential intellectual property it owns or controls available on a zero-royalty basis. The goal of WWiSE is to create a truly open next-generation WLAN standard suitable for global adoption.

Regulatory Compliance

In order to facilitate global adoption, compliance with the requirements of all major regulatory domains was a central objective the WWiSE proposal. The WWiSE proposal consists of both mandatory and optional elements. Mandatory elements are those features that any product must support to be compliant with the eventual standard. Optional elements can be included at the discretion of the product manufacturer only after mandatory requirements have been met. In order to meet the objective of global regulatory compliance, WWiSE makes use of 20-MHz channels mandatory, with the use of 40 MHz channels being optional.

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