|
Aug 12 2003 The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15 Working Group has voted to form a new study group to investigate an alternative physical layer (PHY) to the 802.15.4 wireless personal area network (WPAN) standard, known as ZigBee. Fourteen companies, including Samsung Electronics (which last week joined the ZigBee Alliance board of directors), Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics, have suggested potential applications with features that would be addressed by a new PHY. Products based on the 802.15.4 standard operate in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band at 250Kbps over 10 to 75 meters. According to Jason Ellis of General Atomics, the IEEE 802.15.4a Study Group (SG4a) is focusing on two major new features that an alternate PHY would provide: precision location determination capability and high aggregate capacity. For example, in a warehouse environment, such capabilities would enable quick and precise pinpointing of products, and allow a scanner to locate a particular sensor among a large number of sensors in close proximity. A 15.4a standard would be at the other end of the spectrum from the 15.3a specification, emphasizing low power, low data rate and low cost, said Ellis, the SG4a vice chair. He noted that the new PHY would not necessarily be lower-cost or lower-power than the existing standard. "The 15.4 standard is very competitive in cost and power consumption and we're not challenging it on those levels. We're pushing new features, new application sets, new market opportunities." While technically it's too early in the game to select a technology for the alternative PHY--the IEEE requires that the technical requirements of the PHY must be identified first--UWB's precision location capabilities make it a leading candidate, said Larry Taylor, founder and system architect of Staccato Communications and the SG4a chair. Those capabilities allow it to address problems that existing radios haven't been able to solve, he said. For example, he said while many products now contain RFID tags for inventory management, there is no way to read an entire palette full of tags with a single swipe of a scanner. "This would be a tremendous application if somebody could bring out products that could do that." Ellis and Taylor also moved to form a study group at the May IEEE meeting in Dallas, but their motion fell short by one vote. Taylor said there were questions about how 15.4a would differ from 15.4. In response, the group issued an informal call for applications to identify new market opportunities. Now that they are an official study group, their task will be to create a project authorization request (PAR) and identify 5 criteria (5C) that differentiate their activity from existing standards. Once those two requirements are satisfied, the group can move to form a task group that would start work on a standard. In addition to location capabilities, Taylor said he also hopes to
explore extremely low power consumption in 15.4a. "I think if you can have
an active radio communication device that consumes a small enough amount of
power then you can start thinking about using those in an almost unlimited
range of applications," he said. "I will be looking for contributions, and I
will certainly be trying to steer 15.4a towards looking at extremely low
power consumption applications and also techniques in the standard if we get
around to defining it."
|
|
|||||||
