Wisair Leads PULSERS II

Last week, Wisair announced that it has taken a leadership position in the OFDM Very High Data Rate (> 1 Gbps) work package for the European Commission’s PULSERS Phase II (Pervasive Ultrawideband Low Spectral Energy Radio Systems Phase II) Research Project. PULSERS is a consortium of 36 organizations working to research and promote ultrawideband (UWB) solutions in Europe.

This follows ULTRAWAVES and PULSERS Phase I, also dedicated to demonstrating the feasibility of commercial UWB solutions. “The European Commission, in the last three and a half years or so, have been very aggressively trying to commercialize ultrawideband technology,” says Serdar Yurdakul, Wisair’s Director of U.S. Business Development and Marketing.

As the Project Summary on the PULSERS Web site puts it, the project’s objective is to work toward “a consolidated European approach regarding the spectrum requirements (terrestrial and satellites) in the evolution beyond 3G, and a clear European understanding of the novel ways of optimizing spectrum usage when moving beyond 3G.”

The official aims of the project are to:

• Materialize consolidated user application scenarios
• Provide UWB system solution verification platforms
• Perform interference and coexistence investigations
• Provide significant influence on regulation and standardization on European and worldwide levels
• Further development and verification of key technologies
• Provide advanced technologies enabling large-scale UWB exploitation

For Wisair, Yurdakul says, this will be similar to the work the company did in the ULTRAWAVES project, for which Wisair worked with Philips to create a demonstration in which images were streamed over ultrawideband to three different flat panel televisions at the same time.

“What we want to do is basically to take a snapshot of the technology and demonstrate it,” he says.

While Wisair and other companies participating in PULSERS are also members of the WiMedia Alliance, Yurdakul says their efforts are complementary to that consortium. “The WiMedia Alliance is creating the best technology to standardize for worldwide use, and PULSERS is basically looking at the technology more from a user’s point of view – how could this be used, what environments, what applications,” he says.

While PULSERS is focused on examining issues related to the deployment of UWB specifically in Europe, Yurdakul is quick to stress that many non-European companies are participating (Wisair is headquartered in Israel), and that the effects will be felt worldwide. “Of course we want to assimilate standards and regulations in Europe – that’s very critical for the success of ultrawideband,” he says.

Getting involved in PULSERS and projects like it, Yurdakul says, gives Wisair hope that a global UWB standard may actually be attainable. “We want to help make this technology as regulated as possible so that a single device can work worldwide – or that fairly closely-related devices can operate in a worldwide regulatory environment,” he says.