WNL at IEEE 802 July plenary

The WNL team has participated in the IEEE 802 LMSC July plenary session. It was the first plenary session that went online. During the session, the WNL team was involved in multiple significant events for IEEE 802.11.

The first presentation after the opening plenary was of Wireless Next Generation (WNG), aka. “What’s Next Group”. Here the initial ideas are presented, that may find their ways into the standard. In this session, there was a discussion on a novel scheme that may optimize content transfer in Wi-Fi Mesh networks.

Next, a Task Group 11be (TGbe) meeting was held, where the WNL team has a special interest. 11be is a standard amendment with the goal of providing the capacity of up to 30 Gbit/s and supporting real-time applications for future Wi-Fi 7. TGbe is split into two ad-hoc groups: MAC and PHY, and each ad-hoc group had its separate meeting. The focus of TGbe was to form make a group of people, responsible for populating Draft 0.1 – the first draft of the 11be amendment. From the further discussion in the group, it was clear that multi-link and multi-RU allocation are the two most anticipated features of 802.11be.

Another group that caught the WNL team’s attention is the SENS Task interest group (SENS TIG). This group works in the direction sensing devices, which use a radio signal to discover people or objects in the room, track their movement, or identify gestures. During this session, the group discussed what channel model to use and how to evaluate the performance of a sensing device. Besides, July plenary session was a pivotal event. SENS TIG has presented its Project Authorization Request (PAR) and Criteria for Standards Development (CSD) to the 802.11 Working Group, where they were accepted by unanimous consent. It means that the SENS TIG will turn into Task Group 802.11bf and will start to develop a new standard amendment.

The longer the WNL members participate in the IEEE 802 plenary sessions, the more capabilities in the IEEE 802 community they get. After the last session, 4 members of WNL were granted aspirant rights, so they can access IEEE 802 standards and their drafts. WNL now also has 2 voters, who are eligible to cast their vote on essential decisions inside the 802.11 Working Group.

Wireless Networks Lab is a ‘Megagrant’ lab established in 2017 around the project on Cloudified Wireless Networks for 5G and beyond, led by Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz. The team regularly reports at leading IEEE conferences, runs industrial projects, and contributes to the standardization of wireless networks.