A quiet looking professor from IIT Chennai has been rather busy over the past months outside the classroom?holding discussions, making presentations, liaising with Indian telecom operators. Slowly, he has been scripting an Indian story in the next generation international wireless standardisation, which ensures that equipments ?talk to each other?. In other words, guarantee that a radio transmitter built by one company, for instance, effectively communicates with the radio receiver built by another firm.
The man in question, Bhaskar Ramamurthi heads the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT), a society set up jointly by the department of IT (DIT) and industry. One of its missions is to participate in these standardisations, addressing Indian market requirements. Historically, the country has been missing the bus when it came to contributing to wireless standard setting. When research organisations and the industry woke up a few years ago, the 3G standard had already been finalised. They now fancy a good chance with the 4th generation of radio technologies, which seeks to greatly enhance the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks.
CEWiT is participating in two major ongoing 4G standardisation efforts?802.16m and LTE advanced. 802.16 is a series of wireless broadband standards authored by the IEEE, an association that advances technological innovation. Recently, the IEEE 802.16 Working Group convened in Bangalore to thrash out the new ?m? standard.
Ramamurthi was at his busy best.
?Before this, there was hardly any participation in wireless standardisation from India,? Ramamurthi says. ?In fact, the total number of participation in telecom standards from India is tiny. I am aware of only one effort before this from Sasken,? he adds.
India, now a telecom powerhouse, needed a voice because its technological requirements are different from the advanced world. The country?s participation is now ensuring that 4G gets tailored to Indian needs.
?In 802.16m, which is getting finalised, we have made a fairly significant contribution. We went to the standards meetings and highlighted the difference in our rural requirements. Then we focused on contributing to address these requirements,? the professor says.
One contribution was on improving the performance of a system in a high interference scenario?India has a high interference problem. Another contribution has to do with what the professor calls ?wireless femto?. Along with 4G technologies, users in advanced economies may see a product called the femto base station?a very small base station. In appearance and the way it works, it resembles a Wi-Fi access point and will connect the DSL router.
?If you are connected to the internet while on the road and then walk into the house, the connection will seamlessly change from the base station on the street to the base station inside your house, without your intervention,? Ramamurthi says. This way, the user gets very high speed while freeing up spectrum for the operator.
However, the femto will have limited use in India because the country doesn?t have enough wireline. It needs other ways of improving performance when indoors. ?One of the contributions we have made is, in layman?s terms, a wireless femto. We want to use a large number of relays in the Indian context, not an obvious use case in other countries,? the professor says.
Jose Puthenkulam, director, WiMAX Standards and vice-chairman IEEE 802.16 Working Group, Intel Corporation, says the world will see a lot more participation from India beyond 4G in the coming years because the country is transitioning from a phase of being a solutions provider to being an innovator. ?We want IEEE standards meeting to come to India more often. A lot of NRIs participate in these efforts as well,? he says.
Standard bodies have now begun brainstorming life beyond 4G as well. The ?Internet of Things? is one such discussion point. ?The Internet can become an automated communications medium. Vending machines can automatically send reports to the supplier side?my juice is empty, refill it. That is the future,? says Puthenkulam.
?So we are looking at evolving the 4G standard to support the Internet of Things. There may not be a user using the device. But the device automatically does things on behalf of the user. It is machine to machine communications,? he says. Another example is remote cameras. Whenever moving objects come by, the cameras send an alert. But as of now, IEEE believes the world has a lot to gain from just 4G, a vast improvement over 3G. 3G was essentially based on CDMA technology. 802.16 introduced OFDMA?orthogonal frequency-division multiple access. It is a technology suitable for broadband.
?802.16 was the first standard to introduce it in 2005. We also introduced a lot of technologies that became revolutionary?because the access is all based on IP technology. The old wireless was based on the circuit based network and it focused on voice,? Roger Marks, chairman of IEEE 802.16 Working Group says.
4G gives an operator much more capacity, more flexibility in how they build their networks and enables them to do that at a much lower cost. For the mobile consumer, 4G means networks that can really match wired networks in internet services. It means faster downloading and quick sharing of heavy files.
While 3G transmits data between 500 kilobits per second and 1.5 megabits per second, trials in the US of 4G found that average data rates on the downlink can be at least five to 12 times higher.
?The kind of capabilities that people will see in 3G is way higher than 4G. 3G has been very slow to develop. Only recently has it lived up to capabilities that were originally advertised in the 1990s,? Marks says.
By comparison, 4G technology is stable and will not be so many years behind. 4G, Mark believes, can be widely deployed in two years. ?3G is not a competitor to wired internet services. 4G ones are,? he stresses.