Standards Focus

IEEE SEEKS TO GROW COOPERATION IN EUROPE

There are standards organizations focused on specific sectors of technology. And there are standards organizations within individual countries. But while they each play an important role, it’s a globalized world and the lines between both technologies and nations are blurring. That’s where the need for a truly global, comprehensive standards framework comes in.

That was the basic message that members of the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group (CAG) brought to business leaders and stakeholders in London and Paris in September, seeking to encourage them to increase their participation in IEEE. Phil Wennblom, director of standards for Intel, participated in the Paris roundtable discussion between IEEE-SA and members of industry. Roundtable discussions were also held in London and with small- and medium-enterprise companies in Paris. While members of the CAG met with the national standards bodies in the United Kingdom (UK) and France—BSI and AFNOR, and the CAG promoted standards education in an outreach visit in the UK with Europractice.

Wennblom sees IEEE’s size and global reach as important attractions for stakeholders and industry in Europe, which is somewhat underrepresented in IEEE-SA compared to the well-established North American market and the rapidly growing Asian one.

"Technology boundaries are changing," Wennblom says. "It used to be that telecom, IT, consumer electronics were their own sectors—now they all overlap. A good example of that is the Smart Grid. It brings together the power industry, computing, communications—all at once."

"IEEE offers 44 different societies under one roof—it’s a good place to do things across sectors," Wennblom says. "It’s the largest professional association in the world, with 400,000 members. Having access to what those experts think is one of the main benefits of participation."

Wennblom also sees IEEE’s experience in managing the process of standards development as a key asset. "IEEE has a track record," he says. "It’s developed a number of highly successful standards, so it’s viewed as an attractive place to do high quality work."

He says that there was good interest from the stakeholders his group met with and they were receptive, with many good questions about aspects of IEEE, from its relationship with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to the pluses and minuses of individual versus corporate processes of working. "There are a lot of organizations out there, but IEEE is seen as having an excellent process that works well and is very thorough. Combine that with the experts involved in IEEE and you have something that a lot of people are interested in."

LEADING-EDGE COMPANIES COME TOGETHER THROUGH IEEE TO MAKE MOBILE VIDEO MORE REAL

"If you’re downloading commercial content, you’re downloading a video that was made in a studio with actors and lights and big cameras. It was encoded multiple times in different ways, to get it down to as little bandwidth as possible while maintaining the highest possible quality. But when it’s just you and me with no makeup on our phones in real time, we have none of that," says John Ralston, CEO of Droplet Technology in Palo Alto, California.

Ralston’s company is one of several that have come together to help shape IEEE P1907.1™, Draft Standard for Network-Adaptive Quality of Experience (QoE) Management Scheme for Real-Time Mobile Video Communications. Its goal: to provide a standard that will facilitate a new generation of mobile video technologies that can deliver better quality real-time video via a smarter end-to-end experience

"Real-time video presents twice the technical challenge of downloading video, because it’s traveling in two directions at once," Ralston says. “And whatever it captures as it happens is what you have—there’s no taking it offline to process."

"But the other issue is the nature of the end-to-end connection itself. Typically from your phone to your mobile provider it’s asymmetrical—uploading is at a much lower speed than downloading—and your bit rate is fluctuating pretty dramatically second by second. And unlike with commercially downloaded video, you can’t resend or buffer video packets to smooth out glitches in the network. So the big challenge is, how do you maintain the illusion of smoothly flowing video in an environment that is so unstable?"

That’s the big question which many different organizations are attempting to answer. The first step that IEEE P1907.1 sets out to facilitate involves making the network more aware of itself. "Right now, each piece of your connection is monitoring itself, but it’s not really using that information in the most useful way," Ralston explains. "If that information can be shared from one end to the other, then each device can become network adaptive, adjusting what it sends to and takes from the network to better match the conditions that exist at that moment. The information is out there, but there’s no means to share it yet."

Along the way, companies like Droplet have begun changing how they think about compression—approaching it less in terms of what computers "see," and more in terms of how the human eye perceives vision. Ralston says that often means thinking less in the mathematical terms of compression technology, and more in an impressionistic fashion, like a painter or an animator. "As humans, we map the world in a very different fashion from computers," he says. "We’re predisposed to look at faces and movement, not backgrounds. So we’re learning things from animation and gaming about what makes video feel ‘real’ as you’re watching it." Where traditional codecs will slow frame rates down to maintain detail, Ralston says a more human-vision-oriented approach might do the opposite, maintaining the illusion of movement even as the image quality gets sketchier.

For Ralston, bringing leading-edge companies in the field together to set standards for real-time mobile video through IEEE was the only logical way to make it happen. "The problem of real-time mobile video is bigger than any one company or component. It’s not a codec problem, it’s not a device or an infrastructure problem, it’s not a capacity problem. It’s an end-to-end system problem involving all of those things, and only IEEE had the scope to address it."

The project has big implications for every player in the constantly-expanding mobile market —from telecoms to cellphone and infrastructure manufacturers. With the cost of delivering mobile data estimated to reach $370 billion by 2016, according to Juniper Research, anything that can manage demand better will yield a significant ROI. "Video is the big payload—it’s what causes network congestion. Then it gets lost, and the amount of traffic goes up to make up for the previous failures," Ralston explains. "Meanwhile, as the quality of experience goes down, the provider can’t charge for it. It’s a vicious cycle and there’s a lot of interest in finding ways out of it."

Get more information on the draft standard. Find out more about getting involved in the development of this project. Being part of the process requires IEEE-SA Corporate Membership.

NEW TESTING STANDARDS FOR ELECTRIC STORAGE WILL HELP GROW RENEWABLE ENERGY

Traditionally electrical utilities run night and day, making power as needed. But renewable energy sources don’t work that way, and the growth in everything from wind to solar power has led to increased demand for storage equipment and systems connected to an electric power system. And that leads to demand for standards for how those connections are made—and tested.

A working group is now at work on establishing test procedures for electric energy storage equipment and systems for electric power systems (EPS) applications. This new standard, IEEE P2030.3™, Draft Standard for Test Procedures for Electric Energy Storage Equipment and Systems for Electric Power Systems Applications, will include both single devices with comprehensive functions, and components with limited functions.

The reason for the testing standards is to ensure that storage equipment and systems that connect to an EPS meet the requirements specified in related IEEE standards. Standardized test procedures are necessary to establish and verify compliance with those requirements. These test procedures need to provide both repeatable results, at independent test locations, and have flexibility to accommodate the variety of storage technologies and applications.

Standards on interconnecting electric energy storage with power systems are currently in sponsor ballot process. The standards would apply to a number of industries and institutions including hardware manufacturers, utilities, and energy service companies.

See more information about IEEE P2030.3. Find out more about getting involved in the development of this project. Being part of the process requires IEEE-SA Corporate Membership.

CONFORMANCE CERTIFICATION FOR ETHERNET PASSIVE OPTICAL NETWORKS STANDARD IN DEVELOPMENT

"You’ve got a multi-billion-dollar network. You’re not going to add something to it that puts your network in jeopardy without knowing if it works," says Ravi Subramaniam, technical director of the IEEE Conformity Assessment Program (ICAP).

That’s how he sums up the need that ICAP is addressing with a new certification program under development for the IEEE P1904.1™ series of standards for telecom carriers (which has regional sub-variations for North America, Europe and Asia). The draft documents, whose full titles are Draft Standard for Conformance Test Procedures for Service Interoperability in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks, will specify a suite of conformance tests for system-level requirements of Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) equipment used in telecom switching facilities and elsewhere within the telecom system.

Previously, says Subramaniam, "Once standards were published, there was no post activity, no systematic conformity assessment program. Vendors could claim to have completed certain tests and say they met a standard, but there was no way to verify the claim." ICAP’s mission is to create a recognized certification of basic functionality across industries that can be used by vendors in their marketing to assure end users that their products meet the latest standards. When it rolls out, IEEE P1904.1™ will be one of the first to reach the marketplace.

The process is straightforward. ICAP will accredit and monitor a group of test laboratories which manufacturers or others can use to evaluate their products. ICAP will ensure that the labs themselves are technically capable and have an established quality system (typically conforming to ISO 17025).

When a report is submitted to ICAP, it will issue the certification, which includes a logo that the vendor can use on their product and in marketing. To thwart counterfeiting, ICAP will also maintain an online registry of certified products.

For Subramaniam, the advantages of certification for vendors will be clear: "It creates an even playing field that shows end users that you meet the requirements of the standard. This gives you an opportunity to compete not on basic function but on the value-added components of your business."

Get more information or find out how to participate on the draft standards:

• P1904,1-Conformance01
• P1904,1-Conformance02
• P1904,1-Conformance03

Get involved in the draft process. Being part of the process requires IEEE-SA Corporate Membership.

TRANSACTION LEVEL MODELING ADDED TO SYSTEMC® STANDARD

"If you have a smart phone or a digital camera, chances are SystemC was used in the design of that device," says Stan Krolikoski, group director at Cadence Design Systems in San Jose and chair of the IEEE P1666™ working group. "Where SystemC shines is in the modeling of devices which need to run multiple apps in parallel, like a browser, video and so on. You want a model where it’s all going to work together. You couldn't do that in C or C++, but you can in SystemC and that’s why it’s used worldwide for this kind of modeling and product development."

And Krolikoski says that "worldwide" is no exaggeration. The development of the newly revised standard, IEEE 1666™-2011, IEEE Standard SystemC(R) Language Reference Manual, brought together companies from North America, Asia and Europe. "It’s always a problem with teams spread over multiple continents—how to have meetings when it’s going to be the middle of the night for somebody. We divided the process into two parts. The executive group got together once a month, moving the meeting time around so that it was the middle of the night for a different team each time. The tech group literally only had one phone meeting—everything else was by email. It was a virtual meeting process, but it worked very well."

The reason for the revised standard was that as the electronics industry builds more complex systems involving large numbers of components including software, the need grows for a design language that can manage the complexity and size of these systems. The SystemC design language provides a mechanism for managing this complexity, with the facility to model hardware and software together at multiple levels of abstraction, a capability not available in traditional hardware description languages.

By providing a precise and complete definition of the SystemC library including a Transaction Level Modeling library, the initial standard developed in 2005 has been updated to address the needs of architects and designers who address complex systems that are hybrids of hardware and software. IEEE 1666-2011 was approved by the IEEE-SA Standards Board in September.

Stakeholders for this project are Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies that implement the technology, Integrated Circuit (IC) suppliers who use it, and end users who build systems based on it.

View more information about this standard