Helps test and solidify standards for smartphone interface
The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) has long been renowned for its key role in helping get multivendor networking equipment and components to work together. So it’s no surprise that it should be addressing a few issues concerning one of today’s hottest communications areas: mobility.
For example, the lab has teamed up with a group called the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance, a gang of companies working to create standards for smartphone interfaces. It is defining how components within smartphones communicate with one another to move data around.
PLEA TO INDUSTRY: Stop inventing mobile phones
For example, “How does the host processor talk to the display or to an embedded camera? Standardizing these processes should eventually drive down development costs and device power consumption,” explains David Woolf, senior technical staff member at UNH-IOL.
Sounds like a noble goal.
UNH-IOL recently got together for a week with nine companies — handset, processor and display makers among them — to resolve problems with design engineers and help accelerate the standard, Woolf says. The image verification test came first; making sure that when the processor connected to the screen, an image appeared. Then the group, which included Alliance members Agilent Technologies, Fairchild Semiconductor, Nokia, NVidia and Sony Ericsson and others, measured bit error-rate measurements under various conditions and loads.
“There are some MIPI-compliant products out there now, but we’re expecting adoption to ramp up over the next two years” as the standards get refined, Woolf says.
UNH-IOL works in a similar manner with the Wi-Fi Alliance, though unlike the MIPI Alliance, the Wi-Fi Alliance doesn’t create standards or even test for standards compliance. Rather, it tests for product interoperability and certifies those that pass.
UNH, however, will conduct standards compliance testing, should a member want that service, says Mikkel Hagen, senior manager of the UNH-IOL Wireless LAN Consortium.
Another heads up: If you become a member of the consortium — it’s $19K a year — you can have the UNH-IOL do as many product tests as scheduling allows throughout the year.
“Members — vendors, OEMs or enterprises — can dictate the situation,” says Hagen, referring to product configuration and test conditions. He acknowledges that the lab is getting requests for testing streamed audio and video performance under highly populated conditions.
In the absence of a vendor-independent test lab for performance benchmarks, this might be an option. Note, though, the lab doesn’t do much in the way of testing scalability, voice-over-IP-over Wi-Fi quality (such as mean opinion score) or 802.11n optional components, such as transmit beam forming.
At least not yet.
