The LTE North America Awards 2011 are designed to celebrate the innovation and excellence in LTE that has taken place over the past 12 months, taking in 60 nominees across 10 categories. In the lead up to the awards, which will take place on November 8 2011 at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA, we’re taking a look at Category 2 – the Best Contribution to LTE Standards.

This category is for the individuals rather than  companies, and this time there are two nominees vying for this particular award.

Deb Barclay, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Alcatel-Lucent

Deb Barclays has more than 30 years experience in the Telecoms industry and has spent 25 of those at Bell Labs/Lucent where she was a distinguished member of technical staff at Alcatel-Lucent. Here, she has been involved in key work developing the 3GPP core network architecture working group (TSG SA WG2).

She provided technical leadership and promoted cooperation among SA WG2 members.  She was the leading technical contributor to key technical studies, “Support for Internet Protocol (IP) based IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Emergency calls over General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Evolved Packet Service (EPS)” and the “General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enhancements for Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) access”.

They way this benefits LTE is that it is now possible for operators to provide a complete IMS Voice over LTE solution because LTE now supports emergency bearer services; critical in countries where local regulations demand emergency call support.

The work carried out by Barclay’s team means that emergency calls can receive the highest quality of service regardless of the QoS levels paid for by the subscriber, and for the emergency service call to be handed over to networks to which the caller might otherwise have no access.

Dr. Xiang “Steven” Chen, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Dr. Xiang “Steven” Chen has been involved in the standardisation of LTE since LTE’s inception in 2005. Since 2008, Steven has been the global RAN WG4 head of delegation for Huawei Technologies.

Over the year, Dr Chen has made many contributions towards the successful deployment of LTE.

Highlights of these include taking a leading role in defining key RF specifications for LTE equipment, working on interference management for femtocells, preparing many 3GPP bands for LTE deployment, and deep involvement in the development of MSR (multi-standards radio) that can support GSM, UMTS and LTE simultaneously. He has also been driving the work on LTE pico eNodeBs,  an important enabler for heterogeneous network deployment.

With an eye on the future he has also been instrumental in LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation technology.

Dr. Chen’s extensive work in frequency bands and carrier aggregation has enabled many North American operators to make full use of their spectrum holdings for LTE deployment, while as a direct result of Dr. Chen’s role in the UL-MIMO specification, devices can be equipped with multiple TX antennas, which greatly increases spectrum efficiency and allows for a faster data rate, resulting in a much richer user experience on the mobile network.