HomePlug- Panasonic Face-to-Face Meeting Report

August 28 ~ 29, 2007

Arkados,

Newark, NJ

Meeting Attendees:

  1. David Hunter(Panasonic),
  2. Stefano Galli(Panasonic)
  3. Paul Dixon(Hi-Silicon),
  4. Larry Yonge(Intellon Corporation),
  5. Srinivas Katar(Intellon Corporation).
  6. Oleg(Arkados)
  7. Sean Wei(Arkados)
  8. Bo Zhang(Arkados)
  9. Jim Allen(Arkados)

Meeting Times:

Wednesday, August 28, 2007 --- 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Thursday, August 29, 2007 --- 8:00 a.m. 3:30 p.m.

Minutes for August 28

Agenda:

1)October Meeting Strategy

2)Native Co-operation Protocol

3)Channel Access for common MAC

4)Document Merger Details

  1. In-home submission
  2. Access Submission

October Meeting Strategy

  1. Discussion with John Philippe for clarification of the process
  2. Before the first elimination vote, there will be a three way merger for In-home proposals and two way merger for Access proposals – resulting in only two proposals for in-home and three proposals for Access in the elimination votes
  3. After elimination voting, only one proposals will remain for In-home and Access
  4. Strategy will be re-assessed after Sept 14.

Native Co-operation Protocol

David’s Coexistence Market Limitations:

  1. Regionalization
  2. In high-buying region
  3. 85M of 110M households are single family
  4. MDUs tend towards single technology
  5. MDU units tend to be 200m apart (electrically)
  6. Market penetration percentages are higher (compared to WiFi) – 10% of homes would be 100-200m unit market (unit clustering)
  7. Market quickly learn LARGE technology groups (e.g., 802.11g/a)
  8. Offices will pay for “power conditioners”

The above arguments show that it is better to keep NCP simple as the chances of multiple PHYs seeing each other is very low.

The following items were agreed to be the Core Components of NCP

  1. NCP & CEPCA/UPA coexistence will be compatible, this will require some changes in the CEPCA/UPA Coexistence proposal
  2. TDMA Sharing
  3. Time Synchronization
  4. Signal Synchronization
  5. Allocation Synchronization
  6. Dynamic Resource sharing (desired but not necessary)
  7. Between In-home systems with different PHYs
  8. Between Access and In-homes
  9. TDMA Channel Reuse Capability (desired but not necessary)
  10. Maximize reuse regardless of the PHY Type
  11. Cardinality of NCP (desired but not necessary)

Group agreed to rename Native Co-operation Protocol as Inter-PHY Protocol (IPP)

<Action ItemLarry/Srinivas to propose timing parameters for CEPCA so that it will be easier for HomePlug AV to coexist with CEPCA.

<Action ItemIn the spirit of furthering Panasonic and HomePlug cooperation beyond the In-Home and Access clusters, Panasonic and HomePlug have agreed to the following action items,

  • Panasonic will propose to the CEPCA TWG to modify the CEPCA/UPA specifications in order to ensure compatibility with HomePlug AV.
  • Oleg to propose to the HomePlug Board to publicly endorse and support in IEEE the modified CEPCA/UPA coexistence proposal.

IPP for Sept 14 Submission:

  • IPP will be described in terms of generic signaling at the PHY layer
  • The MAC layer will be TDMA based. MAC signaling will be synchronized to the AC line cycle.
  • FDM coexistence will not be described and the decision to support will be made in the future.
  • Fair Fixed Resource Allocation will be specified as a baseline. Provisions for dynamic resource allocation mechanisms will be left for future revisions.
  • Each PHY/PLCP section will have an IPP sub-section that will exactly be the same.
  • Introduction in IPP section will provide the rationale for IPP to enable fair resource sharing between P1901 PHYs
  • DONOT use the words “Coexistence” or “Cooperation” or “Coordination” in the IPP section

Channel Access

  1. CSMA Back-off will be part of PLCP
  2. TDMA Schedules managed by the Common MAC
  3. Manages information about start and end times of each allocation and the associated queues

Minutes for August 29

Document Merger Details – In-home Submission

  • HomePlug and Panasonic have generated on an outline for merging the In-Home proposals. The following word document contains the merged outline.
  • <Action Item> Larry/Srinivas to propose an outline for merged Access proposals.