stds-802-mobility: Call For Proposals in 802.20

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Although the 802.20 Working Group has been established for over a year, there has yet to be a call for proposals that will lead to the selection of the technologies we will adopt. It is understood that proposals will have at least two parts. There will be overview presentation material, suitable for an oral explanation of the technology, and there will be detailed documentation worthy of study to better understand the nuances and implications of adopting the proposed technology. Preparation of the detailed documentation will be expensive and time consuming, and is likely to include extensive simulations as well as building and testing of early hardware. Companies planning to submit proposals for 802.20 presently have the PAR as guidance for the requirements that their technologies must meet. An understood second requirement is: Their proposed technologies must be judged to be superior to the other alternatives we will be considering. This second requirement is one that will be quantitatively understood only after the proposals have been made. In addition to these, there is the requirements document, which is presently under development. I would hope that companies are not waiting to do basic technology development and testing aimed at addressing 802.20s requirements until the finalization of our requirements document. We are unlikely to learn anything startling as we complete it.

Therefore, I am sending this email to put all technology contenders on notice that they should be busily refining their technologies, documenting their testing and simulations, and generally putting together their stories as to why 802.20 should be selecting their technologies. I intend to put forward a motion at the March meeting requesting proposals be submitted to 802.20 for our consideration in May and July. If you have a serious proposal, your preparation for the presentation of your technology should already be underway.

While the preparation of the detailed presentation will take significant time, the overview presentation including a description of the technology and its basic performance characteristics should be much easier and faster to prepare.

As a working group we are best served with the early presentation of material to give us maximum time to evaluate the technologies. However, as a participating company with a contending technology proposal, the later the declaration of our proposed technology the better. Therefore, to serve the needs of the WG we should be putting in place a process that encourages early disclosure of the technologies we will have to be evaluating.

To that end, I suggest that we require each company that wants to respond to our call for proposals, to submit as a minimum, the summary presentation at the meeting of the WG following our call for proposals. This summary proposal should contain sufficient detail to provide an excellent overview of the technology, and allow experts to understand at a basic level, the implications of choosing that technology.

In addition, we can further encourage companies to submit their full detailed information at the first meeting after the call for proposals to provide them with an additional session to make a follow-up presentation, responding to questions raised, clarifying ambiguities, and generally polishing their proposal to make it more acceptable to the WG.

We now have almost 6 months until our July meeting. Companies that have technologies that may be serious contenders for adoption in the first 802.20 standard should be well along in the development of those technologies, and should be able to prepare a detailed presentation by our July meeting. I understand there will always be newer, less developed technologies that will be still better. However, that basic situation will not change with time. Further, these new technologies are not the ones that the justification of our PAR was based on. Therefore, we should set the July 2004 meeting as the cutoff date for submitting detailed presentations for consideration as an 802.20 technology for our first standard.

Working back from the July date, we should require summary presentations at our May interim meeting, with detailed proposals encouraged.

For purposes of planning the May interim meeting, we will need a rough idea of the number of technologies that will be presented in May, and whether they will be overview presentations or in depth presentations. We will also have to be able to estimate the time we will need to allot for each presentation, and, by implication, the time we will need for our interim meeting. Therefore, declaration of intention to make a presentation in May should be done at our March meeting before we decide how many days our interim meeting will be.

Please consider this email as providing you with early notice, that if such a motion is adopted in March, you will have had from mid January to make the determination in March and to put together at least your high level proposal by our May meeting.