IEEE Standards Focus

 
September 2007
  

News Notes
CAG Elections

Elections have begun for two at-large members to the Corporate Advisory Group, which oversees the IEEE Corporate Standards Program. Nominees for these positions are:

  • Phil Wennblom, Director on International Standards, Regulations and Technology Programs, Intel,

  • Karen Bartleson, Director Interoperability and University Programs, Synopsys, and

  • Christian Jacquenet, Head of Standards, France Telecom.
Representatives for the corporate members of the IEEE Standards Association will cast their votes for these positions between August 1 and September 15. The results will be announced in November. Those elected will serve two-year terms starting 1 January 2008. Questions concerning this election should be sent to Corporate Standards.


IEEE China Office Opens

The IEEE has now opened an office in Beijing to provide a standing presence in China for all IEEE activities. This facility has special meaning for the IEEE-SA Corporate Standards Program, which has emphasized outreach in that country. Ning Hua, who is Director of IEEE China Office, is well acquainted with the IEEE-SA Corporate Program and its priorities because he played an important role in helping the CAG set up many of its recent activities in China.

IEEE-SA Entity Project Participation Fee Increased

Effective 4 September 2007, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Entity Project Participation (EPP) fee will increase from $3750 USD to $3900 USD. This fee is charged to each entity wishing to maintain voting rights in an IEEE entity standards working group each year.

The IEEE-SA Corporate Program allows for the development of standards under the entity representation model (one vote per company at the working group and sponsor ballot levels). Entity participants include academic institutions, corporations, government bodies, partnerships, consortia, and standards-development organizations. See http://standards.ieee.org/corpforum/index.html for more information.

The EPP fee has been adjusted by the IEEE-SA Board of Governors to reflect increased standards-development costs. This is the first adjustment to the fee since its implementation two years ago, and it will be adjusted annually in the future. Any EPP fee billed after 4 September will be invoiced at the new fee level.

Email the IEEE-SA Corporate Program Office for more information about IEEE-SA entity standards development activities or call: +1-732-562-5342.

Upcoming CAG Meetings:

The Corporate Advisory Group has scheduled the following meetings in 2007 and 2008:
  • 28-29 August 2007 in New York City, NY, USA. It will be hosted by IBM.
  • 29-30 November 2007 in Hallandale Beach, FL, USA. This will be colocated with the IEEE-SA governance meeting series.
  • 4-5 March 2008 in Washington State, USA. It will be hosted by Microsoft.
  • 3-14 May 2008 in Tokyo, Japan. It will be hosted by Sony.
  • 21-22 August 2008 in Ontario, Canada. It will be hosted by Nortel.
  • 4-5 December 2008. The location remains to be determined. This will be colocated with the IEEE-SA governance meeting series.
Please email for information on meeting agendas or attending these meetings.

Subscribe to IEEE Standards Focus: News of the IEEE-SA Corporate Program here.

Email the IEEE-SA Corporate Standards Program Office or call +1 732-562-5342.

The IEEE Standards Association
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway NJ 08854 USA

Gaining A Presence in North Africa

The IEEE Corporate Standards Program continued its global outreach with a series of activities in Tunisia centered on a two-day seminar. This seminar, IEEE Global Standards and Developing Economies: Broadband Access and Infrastructure Seminar, was held 9 and 10 May in Tunis. It was accompanied by media interviews, a CAG quarterly meeting, a reception at the American ambassador’s residence, and outreach trips to companies in Europe.

The seminar, which was sponsored by the Tunisian Ministry of Communications Technologies, received high marks from the more than 90 registered attendees and others who attended informally. It featured presenters from government, business, academia and the standards world.

Dr. Montasser Ouaili, Tunisian Minister of Communication Technologies, spoke about how standards help emerging economies create infrastructure and his country’s emphasis on communications. Other speakers included Robert F. Godec, the U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia, the deputy directors of the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and those from global companies like France Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Nortel and Sony.

“This was a fruitful time. We had many discussions with those from Tunisia and other developing nations on how they can best enter the standards community,” said Bilel Jamoussi, Director of Strategic Standards, Nortel, and member of the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group. “Such nations often need help in selecting appropriate standards and in participating in standards development. Our goal is to find ways to provide such support.”

Tunisia  
Tunisia  
Tunisia  
Tunisia  

Other Activities

Tunisia National TV interviewed Chuck Adams, Corporate Advisory Group (CAG) Chair, and Judy Gorman, IEEE-SA Managing Director, for the evening news. Dr. Jamoussi also appeared on Tunisian radio. The interviews looked at why IEEE-SA chose Tunisia for the seminar and the role of standards in the developing world, among other topics. The US ambassador also held a reception at his residence for the members of the CAG and those from Tunisian government and industry, while the Ministry of Communication Technologies hosted a dinner and tour of the Tunis Information Park.

Dr. Adams noted that the seminar broke new ground in reaching out to those in North Africa. “Our goal is to help developing economies create the standards they need,” he said. “Our time in Tunisia gave us valuable insight in how to work with governments, academia and businesses in such locales and steps we need to take in this direction.”

Some members of the CAG also met in Munich, Germany, first with BMW on how to tailor standards to the automobile environment and then with the head of standards at Siemens. A meeting with Telecom Italia near Milan, Italy addressed IEEE-SA ongoing activities and how it might participate in forming new standards.

The CAG’s regular quarterly meeting was held in conjunction with the seminar. Observers who attended included the deputy directors of ITU-T and ETSI and representatives from France Telecom and Alcatel Lucent. The participation of ITU-T and ETSI was especially important in further building IEEE-SA’s relationship with these organizations.

The seminar produced many concrete results. For instance, the University of Sfax in Tunisia became the first African organization to join the Corporate Program. In addition, a professor at the university has begun to form an IEEE subsection in Tunisia.

Many CAG and Corporate Program members were involved in creating the seminar and other activities. Those who helped lead this effort included: Bilel Jamoussi, who worked with the Tunisian government to set up the seminar; Jim Hughes, who led the team that created the seminar agenda; and Phil Wennblom, who set up the visits to companies in Europe.

An Eye Toward Future Service Networks

The ever-expanding volume of services and content carried on telecommunications systems poses significant challenges for future networks. With this in mind, a new entity study group is taking the initial steps to develop a standard to integrate future service and telecom networks.

This effort, which is being led by Huawei, based in Shenzen, China, is expected to bring a Project Authorization Request before the IEEE-SA Standards Board in a matter of months. Work on the project, tentatively numbered IEEE P1750™, “Next Generation Service Network (NGSN),” will begin once the IEEE-SA Standards Board okays the project. The NGSN project, which may specify service network architecture for use by service, network and content providers, could form the foundation for a series of NGSN standards.

The services and content that will travel over tomorrow’s networks will originate from companies in many industries and promises to generate trillions of dollars (US) in revenues. Broadband has the potential to support a huge amount of traffic, but new services have traditionally been tied to a specific telecom infrastructure, such as WCDMA or WiMAX. Such bundling often extends the time needed to develop and deploy a service and usually means that service and content providers do not get optimum support from telecom infrastructures. It also limits the ability of telecom operators to share in service/content revenues.

IEEE P1750 will seek to resolve this issue by creating an overlay network architecture to manage the life cycle of multiple, collaborative information and communication services, independent of the transport network involved. Such NGSN architecture aims to help service and content providers speed service time to market without imposing complex logic from multiple sources. The proposed standard would guide telecom operators in providing excellent network support, seamless service delivery, and give them a route to gain revenues from new services and content.

In addition to Huawei, supporting companies include France Telecom, Oracle, and Korea Telecom. Other companies such as IBM, BEA, and China Mobile Communications Corporation have expressed interest in the study group work. The study group is chaired by Jim Carlo and sponsored by the CAG and the IEEE Communications Society. Professor Mehmet Ulema is ComSoc’s technical liaison to the group.

Huawei will host the first meeting of the Next Generation Service Network Study Group in Shanghai from 19-20 September. A planning meeting will be held at IBM’s facility in New York City, USA, on 27 August. All carriers, service providers and other interested parties are invited to attend these meetings and help develop the standard.

The study group hopes to submit a PAR to the IEEE-SA Standards Board for approval to begin work in 2007 and to complete work by 2009. Click here for more information on this effort.

Update on Corporate Program Standards

Many organizations are finding that the ability to create standards in company-based working groups within an IEEE standards process is valuable. This has led to a wide variety of standards activities within the Corporate Standards Program. The program currently has 11 standards projects underway. A brief rundown on each follows.

  • IEEE P1694™, Standard for Enterprise Strategic Decision Management, will give enterprises common methods and work products to help them manage strategic decision making by defining a structure for decision planning, analysis and execution, as well as for collaboration across an enterprise and among enterprises.

  • IEEE P1685™, IP-XACT, Standard Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-Flows. This project will provide an XML schema for metadata that documents the intellectual property characteristics needed to automate IP blocks and define an application programming interface so such metadata is accessible to automation tools. The working group met in May and June to develop and adopt its policies and procedures. http://www.spiritconsortium.org/tech/p1685

  • IEEE P1800™, SystemVerilog Standard: Unified Hardware Design, Specification and Verification Language, will merge the SystemVerilog™ and Verilog™ standards to create a broad language for those who design increasingly complex, very-large-scale integrated circuits. The working group recently created a draft of the standard, which it will continue to refine.

  • IEEE P1801™, Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits, will offer a common format to define the low-power design intent for the integrated circuits (ICs) used in electronic systems.

  • IEEE P1149.7™, Draft Standard for Reduced-Pin and Enhanced-Functionality Test Access Port and Boundary Scan Architecture, will define a debug and test interface to meet an expanding set of challenges facing debug and test systems while preserving the hardware and software investments of those now using IEEE Std 1149.1. The draft standard is expected to enter sponsor ballot in the last quarter of 2007.

  • IEEE P1450.6.1™, Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression, will offer uniform approaches to interfacing test pattern and diagnosis tools for on-chip scan compression to foster interoperability across test platforms from various vendors. The standard is expected to be completed in September 2009.

  • IEEE P1901™, Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications, will be a comprehensive specification for sending high-speed digital data over the power lines from substations to homes and offices. It also will provide for digital voice, data and video signals over electrical lines within structures. Proposal down selection began July 9 on the more than 400 requirements the working group developed for a baseline BPL standard. A sponsor ballot is anticipated in early 2009.

  • IEEE P1902.1™, RuBee Standard for Long Wavelength Network Protocol. RuBee networks operate at long-wavelengths and accommodate low-cost radio tags at ranges to 100 feet. This standard will create a protocol for networks having thousands of such tags operating below 450 KHz. It is targeted for completion in late 2007.

  • IEEE P1900.4™, Architectural Building Blocks Enabling Network-Device Distributed Decision Making for Optimized Radio Resource Usage in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks. This standard will optimize radio usage and improve the overall capacity and quality of service of wireless systems in environments involving multiple radio access technologies. The working group approved the contents of a baseline document in February. The standard is scheduled for completion in March 2009.

  • IEEE P1625™, Standard for Rechargeable Batteries for Portable Computing. This standard, which addresses the design, manufacture and testing of lithium-ion battery cells and packs for portable computing devices, is being revised. It is expected to enter sponsor ballot in late 2007.

  • IEEE P1825™, Rechargeable Batteries for Digital Cameras and Camcorders, will set uniform criteria for the design, production and evaluation for the lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries used in digital cameras and camcorders. A kickoff meeting for this project will be held in September 2007.


 


 


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