IEEE 802.20 or Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA) was a specification by the standard association of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for mobile broadband networks. The main standard was published in 2008. MBWA is no longer being actively developed. This

wireless broadband Wireless broadband is telecommunications technology that provides high-speed wireless Internet access or computer networking access over a wide area. The term comprises both fixed and mobile broadband. The term broadband Originally the word ...

technology is also known and promoted as iBurst (or HC-SDMA, High Capacity Spatial Division Multiple Access). It was originally developed by ArrayComm and optimizes the use of its

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

with the help of smart antennas.

Kyocera is a Japanese multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded as in 1959 by Kazuo Inamori and renamed in 1982. It manufactures industrial ceramics, solar power generating systems, telecommunic ...

is the

manufacturer Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...

of iBurst devices.

Description

iBurst is a mobile broadband wireless access system that was first developed by ArrayComm, and announced with partner

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...

in April 2000. It was adopted as the High Capacity – Spatial Division Multiple Access (HC-SDMA) radio interface standard (ATIS-0700004-2005) by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). The standard was prepared by ATIS’ Wireless Technology and Systems Committee's Wireless Wideband Internet Access subcommittee and accepted as an American National Standard in 2005. HC-SDMA was announced as considered by

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

TC204 WG16 for the continuous communications standards architecture, known as Communications, Air-interface, Long and Medium range (CALM), which ISO is developing for intelligent transport systems (ITS). ITS may include applications for

public safety Public security or public safety is the prevention of and protection from events that could endanger the safety and security of the public from significant danger, injury, or property damage. It is often conducted by a state government to ensur ...

network congestion Network congestion in data networking and queueing theory is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node or link is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queueing delay, packet loss or the blocking of ...

management during traffic incidents, automatic toll booths, and more. An official liaison was established between WTSC and ISO TC204 WG16 for this in 2005. The HC-SDMA interface provides wide-area broadband wireless data-connectivity for fixed, portable and mobile computing devices and appliances. The protocol is designed to be implemented with

smart antenna Smart antennas (also known as adaptive array antennas, digital antenna arrays, multiple antennas and, recently, MIMO) are antenna arrays with smart signal processing algorithms used to identify spatial signal signatures such as the direction of ar ...

array techniques (called

MIMO In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO (), is a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO has become an essential element of wi ...

for multiple-input multiple-output) to substantially improve the

radio frequency Radio frequency (RF) is the oscillation rate of an alternating electric current or voltage or of a magnetic, electric or electromagnetic field or mechanical system in the frequency range from around to around . This is roughly between the ...

(RF) coverage, capacity and performance for the system. In January 2006, the IEEE 802.20 Mobile Broadband Wireless Access Working Group adopted a technology proposal that included the use of the HC-SDMA standard for the 625 kHz Multi-Carrier

time-division duplex A duplex communication system is a point-to-point system composed of two or more connected parties or devices that can communicate with one another in both directions. Duplex systems are employed in many communications networks, either to allow ...

(TDD) mode of the standard. One Canadian vendor operates at 1.8 GHz.

Technical description

The HC-SDMA interface operates on a similar premise as

cellular phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...

s, with hand-offs between HC-SDMA cells repeatedly providing the user with a seamless wireless Internet access even when moving at the speed of a car or train. The standard's proposed benefits: *IP roaming & handoff (at more than 1 Mbit/s) *New MAC and PHY with IP and adaptive antennas *Optimized for full mobility up to vehicular speeds of 250 km/h *Operates in Licensed Bands (below 3.5 GHz) *Uses Packet Architecture *Low Latency Some technical details were: *Bandwidths of 5, 10, and 20 MHz. *Peak data rates of 80 Mbit/s. *Spectral efficiency above 1 bit/sec/Hz using multiple input/multiple output technology (MIMO). *Layered frequency hopping allocates OFDM carriers to near, middle, and far-away handsets, improving SNR (works best for SISO handsets.) *Supports low-bit rates efficiently, carrying up to 100 phone calls per MHz. *Hybrid ARQ with up to 6 transmissions and several choices for interleaving. *Basic slot period of 913 microseconds carrying 8 OFDM symbols. *One of the first standards to support both TDM (FL, RL) and separate-frequency (FL, RL) deployments. The protocol: * specifies base station and client device RF characteristics, including output power levels, transmit frequencies and timing error,

pulse shaping In electronics and telecommunications, pulse shaping is the process of changing the waveform of transmitted pulses to optimize the signal for its intended purpose or the communication channel. This is often done by limiting the bandwidth of the tra ...

, in-band and out-of band spurious emissions, receiver sensitivity and selectivity; * defines associated frame structures for the various burst types including standard uplink and downlink traffic, paging and broadcast burst types; * specifies the modulation, forward error correction, interleaving and scrambling for various burst types; * describes the various logical channels (broadcast, paging, random access, configuration and traffic channels) and their roles in establishing communication over the radio link; and * specifies procedures for error recovery and retry. The protocol also supports

Layer 3 In the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking, the network layer is layer 3. The network layer is responsible for packet forwarding including routing through intermediate routers. Functions The network layer provides the means of transfe ...

(L3) mechanisms for creating and controlling logical connections (sessions) between client device and base including registration, stream start, power control, handover, link adaptation, and stream closure, as well as L3 mechanisms for client device authentication and

secure transmission In computer science, secure transmission refers to the transfer of data such as confidential or proprietary information over a secure channel. Many secure transmission methods require a type of encryption. The most common email encryption is called ...

on the data links. Currently deployed iBurst systems allow connectivity up to 2 Mbit/s for each subscriber equipment. Apparently there will be future firmware upgrade possibilities to increase these speeds up to 5 Mbit/s, consistent with HC-SDMA protocol.

History

The 802.20 working group was proposed in response to products using technology originally developed by ArrayComm marketed under the iBurst brand name. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions adopted iBurst as ATIS-0700004-2005. The Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA) Working Group was approved by

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

Standards Board on December 11, 2002 to prepare a formal specification for a packet-based air interface designed for

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

-based services. At its height, the group had 175 participants. On June 8, 2006, the IEEE-SA Standards Board directed that all activities of the 802.20 Working Group be temporarily suspended until October 1, 2006. The decision came from complaints of a lack of transparency, and that the group's chair, Jerry Upton, was favoring Qualcomm. The unprecedented step came after other working groups had also been subject to related allegations of large companies undermining the standard process.

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

had filed appeals, claiming they were not given time to prepare proposals. These claims were cited in a 2007 lawsuit filed by

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

against Qualcomm. On September 15, 2006, the IEEE-SA Standards Board approved a plan to enable the working group to move towards completion and approval by reorganizing. The chair at the November 2006 meeting was Arnold Greenspan. On July 17, 2007, the IEEE 802 Executive Committee along with its 802.20 Oversight Committee approved a change to voting in the 802.20 working group. Instead of a vote per attending individual, each entity would have a single vote. On June 12, 2008, the IEEE approved the base standard to be published. Additional supporting standards included IEEE 802.20.2-2010, a protocol conformance statement, 802.20.3-2010, minimum performance characteristics, an amendment 802.20a-2010 for a

Management Information Base A management information base (MIB) is a database used for managing the entities in a communication network. Most often associated with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the term is also used more generically in contexts such as in ...

and some corrections, and amendment 802.20b-2010 to support bridging. 802.20 standard was put to hibernation in March 2011 due to lack of activity. In 2004 another wireless standard group had been formed as

IEEE 802.22 IEEE 802.22, is a standard for wireless regional area network (WRAN) using white spaces in the television (TV) frequency spectrum. The development of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN standard is aimed at using cognitive radio (CR) techniques to allow sharing ...

, for wireless regional networks using unused television station frequencies. Trials such as those in the Netherlands by

T-Mobile T-Mobile is the brand name used by some of the mobile communications subsidiaries of the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG in the Czech Republic ( T-Mobile Czech Republic), Poland ( T-Mobile Polska), the United States (T-Mobil ...

International in 2004 were announced as "Pre-standard 802.20". These were based on an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing technology known as FLASH-OFDM developed by Flarion (since 2006 owned by Qualcomm). However, other service providers soon adopted 802.16e (the mobile version of WiMAX). In September 2008, the

Association of Radio Industries and Businesses The , commonly known as , is a standardization organization in Japan. ARIB is designated as the center of promotion of the efficient use of the radio spectrum and designated frequency change support agency. Its activities include those previously ...

in Japan adopted the 802.20-2008 standard as ARIB STD-T97.

markets products supporting the standard under the iBurst name. , Kyocera claimed 15 operators offered service in 12 countries.

Commercial use

Various options are already commercially available using: * Desktop modem with

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

and Ethernet ports (with external power supply) * Portable

modem (using USB power supply) * Laptop modem ( PC card) * Wireless Residential Gateway * Mobile Broadband Router iBurst was commercially available in twelve countries in 2011 including

Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of t ...

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to Lebanon–Syria border, the north and east and Israel to Blue ...

, and

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. iBurst (Pty) Ltd started operation in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

in 2005. iBurst Africa International provided the service in

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...

in 2007, and then later in

Mozambique Mozambique (), officially the Republic of Mozambique ( pt, Moçambique or , ; ny, Mozambiki; sw, Msumbiji; ts, Muzambhiki), is a country located in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi ...

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

and

Kenya ) , national_anthem = " Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi ...

. MoBif Wireless Broadband Sdn Bhd, started service in

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

in 2007, changing its name to iZZinet. The provider ceased operations in March 2011. In Australia, Veritel and Personal Broadband Australia (a subsidiary of Commander Australia Limited), offered iBurst services however both have since been shut down after the increase of 3.5G and 4G mobile data services. BigAir acquired Veritel's iBurst customers in 2006, and shut down the service in 2009. Personal Broadband Australia's iBurst service was shut down in December 2008. iBurst

officially shut down on August 31, 2017. Users were given a choice to keep their @iburst.co.za or @wbs.co.za. iBurst still keeps support staff available, however this is also expected to be shut down by the end of 2017 (no information about support remaining for the email addresses from iBurst has been given).

References

External links