Written by John D’Ambrosia and Dorothy Stanley
With so much more work, education, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and social interaction taking place online (and very often only online) in 2020, the growing global importance of connectivity and bandwidth has been one of the last year’s defining stories.
Connectivity and bandwidth stand to take another giant leap forward in the new year. The IEEE 802® LAN/MAN Standards Committee develops and maintains the standards and recommended practices that undergird our increasingly networked world, and progress in various IEEE 802 activities will factor heavily in a number of key trends for networking in 2021.
#1: A BETTER ONLINE EXPERIENCE NOW
The global pandemic has shown connectivity and bandwidth to be critical to humanity’s wellbeing. Instantaneous growth across multiple application spaces - remote learning, work from home, telemedicine, online shopping, and various other new virtual experiences - have cast a spotlight on the necessity of the world’s wireless and wired infrastructures enabled by IEEE 802. They have revealed opportunities for growth and innovation, as well. Homes with multiple full-time remote workers and students very likely have known the stresses and headaches of network congestion.
The never-ending work to alleviate such issues has been underway in IEEE 802 long before most of the world had heard of COVID-19. For example, innovation of the globally established IEEE 802.11™standard continues to deliver new capabilities. IEEE P802.11ax™, known as “Wi-Fi® 6,” supports increased special efficiency, higher throughput, and enhanced power saving capabilities. Deployment of IEEE P802.11ax-capable devices began in 2017. This amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard is designed to improve user experience for the most bandwidth-intensive applications. Importantly, it defines operation in the 6 GHz frequency band. Operation in the 6 GHz band enables wider traffic channels for more throughput and less congestion over wireless connections of longer distances. As many as 14 additional 80 MHz channels or seven more 160 MHz channels are available in 6 GHz for IEEE 802.11 applications. This translates into additional capacity and greater network performance for more simultaneous users of applications such as high-definition video streaming and virtual reality.
Volume shipments of products which operate in the 6 GHz band based on the IEEE P802.11ax standard will commence and grow significantly in 2021, as regulatory action has intensified to bring the revolutionary new capabilities to users globally. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in April 2020 made all 1200 MHz of the 6 GHz band available for unlicensed use. South Korea Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) in October 2020 ruled to allow IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi operations in the 6 GHz band. Additional regulatory decisions are made or pending globally, including in Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the UK, and the EU to enable all or part of the 6GHz band available for Wi-Fi use.
Work is underway on additional standard amendments, including in the areas of 60GHz operation (IEEE P802.11ay™), WLAN sensing (IEEE P802.11bf™), and enhanced ranging capabilities (IEEE P802.11az™), to enable additional applications and innovation in the market, as well as significant economic growth and societal development.
#2: THE NEXT GENERATION OF CONNECTIVITY AND BANDWIDTH IMAGINED
Networks around the world, including those IEEE 802.11 networks, often connect to wired Ethernet, which is based onthe IEEE 802.3™, IEEE Standard for Ethernet. The networked world relies on this wired infrastructure. Since its development began in 1980 to standardize connectivity among devices inside a LAN, IEEE 802.3 Ethernet has been continually refined and expanded by thousands of IEEE 802 technical experts over the past 40 years to support enhanced capacities and connect more users and devices across more types of networks.
Defining 200 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) Ethernet and 400 Gb/s Ethernet, IEEE 802.3bs™, published in 2017, marked a new maximum data rate for the technology. With bandwidth demand growing across all areas of Ethernet connectivity globally, the IEEE 802.3 Beyond 400Gb/s Ethernet Study Group was launched in December 2020 to look into initiating a new IEEE project to define a new high speed.
The historical trend lines for Ethernet bandwidth demand, as well as the industry’s projected future needs and technology growth curves, indicate that the time to take that next step toward a new high speed is now. The publicly available IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment (BWA) report, released in April 2020, documents undeniable trends around diverse traffic drivers such as video, hyperscale data centers, 5G, and deployment of IEEE 802.11. Everything portends ongoing bandwidth explosion for Ethernet networks around the world for the foreseeable future: more users, faster access speeds, more services, more devices coming online, and greater difference between average and peak bandwidth demands on networks.
Expertise from across Ethernet’s terrific range of application spaces globally will come together in the new IEEE 802.3 Beyond 400Gb/s Ethernet Study Group, to examine the problem and develop the documentation necessary to launch a new standard development project. The first meeting of the group is set for the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group’s January 2021interim session.
#3: NEW APPLICATION SPACES
The IEEE 802 standards family continues to grow into new application spaces. Automotive, aerospace, and industrial are among the application spaces where new standards are designed to enable new capabilities in the new year.
The set of baseIEEE 802.1™ Time Sensitive Networking (TSN)standards, colloquially referred to as the “TSN toolset,” is an emerging technology of the IEEE 802.1 Working Group to deliver the right packet at the right time. The TSN standards in the TSN toolset provide various means and options to achieve deterministic data transfer in packet networks, thereby allowing an Ethernet bridged networking to be used in applications originally designed to use other networking technologies. A fundamental aspect of the TSN toolset allowsreserving smaller portions of overall bandwidth for a given stream.Leveraging this stream reservation, additional tools allow for accurate synchronization, ultra reliability, and bounded low latency that results in zero congestion loss. A TSN profile standard selects which of the base TSN standards in the TSN toolset to use and specifies how to use them in a specific vertical.
Development of TSN profiles is underway for automotive to provide secure, highly reliable, deterministic latency, automotive in-vehicle bridged IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks (IEEE P802.1DG™); for Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) to provide control networks with a low latency, reliable network infrastructure (IEEE 60802™); and for aerospace to provide a broad range of aerospace onboard Ethernet communications including those requiring security, high availability and reliability, maintainability, and bounded latency (IEEE P802.11DP™).
IEEE 802.15 standards for wireless specialty networks (WSN) are designed to enable IoT devices to communicate and interoperate with one another, mobile devices, wearables, optical wireless communications (OWC), autonomous vehicles, etc. IEEE 802.15.4w™is intended to support IoT use cases requiring large ranges (up to 20 kilometers) and long battery lives, such industrial monitoring of pipelines, infrastructure health monitoring, and industrial plant monitoring. IEEE 802.15.4z™addresses emerging needs in the automotive industry for high security, low power, communications, and ranging determination. Both of those standards were approved in June 2020. IEEE P802.15.7a™, meanwhile, is under development to define connectivity for applications such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication using the LED lamps in automobile headlights andtaillights.
Across all of these varied application spaces and technology areas, IEEE 802’s globally open efforts to expand interoperable connectivity and increase bandwidth both through wired and wireless networks never cease. Individuals and organizations are invited to learn more about IEEE 802 initiatives and get involved.
John D’Ambrosia is an IEEE Senior Member and IEEE 802 Executive Committee Member. He is also a Distinguished Engineer at Futurewei, a U.S. subsidiary of Huawei. Currently, he chairs the IEEE P802.3ct 100 Gb/s over DWDM systems Task Force, IEEE P802.3cw 400 Gb/s over DWDM systems Task Force, and chairs the IEEE 802.3 New Ethernet Applications (NEA) Ad Hoc. Previously, he chaired the IEEE 802.3ba Task Force that developed 40GbE/100GbE and the IEEE 802.3bs Task Force that was responsible for 200GbE/400GbE. In addition to his multiple roles in IEEE 802 John is an advisor to the European Photonics Industry Consortium. His previous work experience includes Dell, Force10 Networks, and Tyco Electronics.
