WiMAX Forum Speeds Up Development of New WiMAX Standards

The WiMAX Forum has launched an initiative to accelerate WiMAX features that enhance the average performance of its current Release 1 technology by more than 50 percent while remaining compliant with the IEEE Standard 802.16e. Based on this accelerated schedule, certified products using these enhancements are expected in late 2010.

This initiative will not delay the development of WiMAX Release 2 (WiMAX 2). In support of the expected completion of the IEEE Standard 802.16m in the second half of 2010, the WiMAX Forum is fast-tracking profiling and certification activities to prepare for WiMAX 2 product certification in late 2011.

Enhancements under development include support for additional MIMO antennae on the base stations (4 transmit antennae instead of 2), higher order (64 QAM) modulation on the uplink, downlink beamforming, and improved fractional frequency reuse (FFR) to increase performance in reuse 1 deployments while ensuring multi-vendor interoperability. These new features have the potential to double peak data rates and increase average and cell edge end user performance by 50 percent.

"The intense technical work in IEEE 802.16m has benefitted from a dedicated international collaboration among the world's leading telecom equipment manufacturers, technical organizations, and universities in support of future-looking worldwide operator requirements," said Roger Marks, Vice President for Technology at the WiMAX Forum and Chair of the IEEE 802.16 Working Group. "Organizations such as the Center of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT) Chennai, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) have contributed major innovations to help us bring this advanced technology to market."

WiMAX 2 is based on IEEE Standard 802.16m, which is documented to meet the International Telecommunications Union's "IMT-Advanced" requirements, delivering improvements in coverage and capacity. The standard provides for huge peak (zero path loss) transmission rates -- for example, up to 300 Mbps in a 20 MHz downlink channel -- and even lower latency. By enabling aggregation of multiple RF carriers, wider effective channel bandwidths of up to 100 MHz are possible.