Assignment on Comparison between LTE and WiMAX Submitted to: Dr.

Mahmood Ashraf Submitted by: Arslan Rasheed Registration No: FA12-REE-043

Comsats Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad

Need for 4G:

4th generation is a general term used for mobile broadband networks that are able to meet the particular standards set by ITU (international Telecommunication Union) like the peak rate 100Mbps with high speed mobility and 1Gbps at low speed or for fixed position users. High mobility means that the user is moving in train or in car with the speed of around 350km/hr. besides, all this the spectrum used must be having maximum bandwidth of 1Mhz and the network must be all IP-based switched. It is clear from the above that 4G is not itself a standard or technology but it is the set requirement that any technology should provide in order to be called a 4th generation telecommunication technology. The proposal for 4G was put forward by ITUs 5D working committee called IMT-advanced (International Mobile and Telecommunication). As per requirements of 4G, the maximum delay must be 50-200ms as it supports real time services. In the response of the ITU proposal, two technologies were launched one is called LTE (long term evolution) and the other is WiMAX (worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access). These two technologies are developed by two different authorities and then deployed in different countries. LTE is the product of 3GPP and 3GPP2 (3rd Generation Partnership Project) while WiMAX was proposed by IEEE in its standard IEEE.802.16 family of standards. Both share some common features by fulfilling the requirements of ITU but at the same time both have many technological differences as well on which I have to focus in this assignment.

WiMAX an introduction:
For WiMAX three standards have been proposed up till now one is 802.16e-2004 which is also called the fixed WiMAX that is the very first standard as well. It was deployed in many countries and the consortium consists more than 300 companies across the globe. 2nd standard is enhanced form of 802.16e-2005 which is for mobile access and fixed access both. The latest and the most prominent to meet the requirements of IMT 4G, a standard was developed in 2009 that is known as IEEE802.16e-2009. The very first standard was deployed in Korea which was IEEE 802.16e2004. In USA, the Clearwrie has the largest network of WiMAX. In our country Wateen has developed this network but its IEEE802.11e-2004

LTE an introduction:
3GPP consists of many countries and companies across the globe. America, Japan, Europe, China and Korea are the key players of this consortium while the companies like Ericsson, Cisco, AT&T, Huwaei and Verizon provide the technicalities. LTE has been evolved from HSPA (high speed packet access) cellular standard. It has two releases one is 3GPP-Release8 and which almost compliant with the requirements set by IMT and considered as 3.9G while the other release is 3GPP-Release10. LTE was deployed in Swedish city Stockholm and Norwegian

capital Oslo back in December 2009 by TeliaSonera. All the equipment in Oslo was provided by Huawei and for Stockholm by Ericsson. The modems were built by Samsung. The schematic diagram of the evolution is shown as

Differences:
There is a battle between WiMAX and LTE across the world. Both have many pros and cons and share some common features as well. Here are the important features studied by me to distinguish between the WiMAX and LTE. 1. Physical layer: The WiMAX systems (R.1 and R.2) use OFDMA (Orthogonal frequency Division Multiple Access) both in uplink and downlink while on the other hand LTE uses OFDMA in downlink while SC-FDMA (Single Carrier FDMA) in uplink and its advantageous to use SC-FDMA because it is power efficient and the mobile terminals have low powered batteries with them hence, LTE has an advantage over WiMAX. However, in the downlink OFDMA is used because the Node-B is considered to have unlimited power supply. 2. Duplex Mode: WiMAX R1.0 uses TDD and WiMAX R2.0 uses both TDD and FDD while LTE uses both FDD and TDD.

3. Mobility: WiMAX R1.0 supports user mobility 60-120km/hr and WiMAX R2.0 supports user mobility up-to 350km/hr while on the other hand LTE supports up-to 350km/hr in both releases but practically WiMAX is unable to support over 120km/hr 4. QoS- Oriented resource allocation: As both LTE and WiMAX support multimedia applications so it is necessary to allocate enough bandwidth to users to assure QoS. Both WiMAX and LTE use reservation-based resources allocation but the difference is in implementation. In WiMAX, the time is divided into frames and the time ranges from 2 to 20ms. Every frame is divided into uplink and downlink part. At a frames start, the base station transmits the downlink map and uplink map. These maps specify the resource allocation during a frame. LTE similarly divides the time into frames (see Figure 2b). Each frame lasts 10 ms and consists of 10 subframes of 1 ms each. Subframes 0 and 5 are always reserved for downlink. This lets the base station transmit any special information to manage the subsequent transmissions. LTE also uses a concept called switchpoint; it designates when the transmission will switch between the downlink and uplink. This can happen multiple times in a frame. LTEs switchpoint method offers a more dynamic way of allocating traffic, because we can switch from an uplink to a downlink several times in a frame. Again, LTEs cellular background likely inspired this, since a cell phone conversation could have an equal amount of traffic going from one end to the other 5. Power Consumption: Power consumption is very important in mobile networks as users have handheld equipment with limited batteries so in order to save the batteries such protocols and hardware circuit should be used that are energy efficient. LTE uses DTX and DRX concept with ON/OFF cycle. During OFF cycle, there is no transmission and reception. During the long pauses in the call OFF cycle is used which saves the energy. On the other hand WiMAX also uses sleep mode to save energy in which the MS negotiates with Node-B that when the device will power will off its radio and the Node-B must not send during that period. However, during call there is no such mechanism like in LTE. 6. Security: Security plays a vital role in success of any technology so is the case with 4G. Both WiMAX and LTE have different security implementation. WiMAX introduced a sublayer at the bottom of Data Link layer. WiMAX has two protocols for security one is PKM (Privacy and Key Management) and the other one is encapsulation protocol. PKM is used to distribute the security key while for encryption of data encryption protocol is used. LTE uses the key distribution as same as WiMAX but the difference lies that LTE have no separate layer for security

7. Industry support: There is a big difference between WiMAX and LTE that WiMAX comes from the networking background and LTE is inherited from the cellular mobile background. The main benefit for WiMAX is its early deployment while the for LTE is that it is developed by telecommunication companies. WiMAX forum states that WiMAX has been deployed in more than 500 places and have 10 million subscribers across the world. But now the companies are moving towards LTE i.e. Cisco has announced to quit with WiMAX and Alcatel-Lucent has also ended up with WiMAX and moving towards LTE but on the other way round Clearwire who has done enormous investment is not willing to discontinue. ITU is expected to play an important role in this era. 8. Niche Applications: Some factors may favor one technology over the other in terms of deployment. For example, WiMAX is targeting those markets which have no or very little infrastructure as it is faster and easier to deploy WiMAX. Furthermore, Intel has started to sell computers with embedded WiMAX chips which is a plus point for WiMAX. 9. Relay support: WiMAX has started to deploy relay stations. Relay stations are basically like BS with connectivity to the internet and there is a chain of relay stations that have no connection with data networks and they are connected to the relay station. So, their data is routed through the relay station. Relay stations are cheaper, more flexible and can be moved. LTE has not used this concept yet! 10. Patent Management: The royalty cost for the patents must be as low as possible. It is said that reason for the limited use of 3G is because of royalty cost. So, LTE enjoys small royalty cost as compared to WiMAX 11. Data rate: 1. LTE R.08 Downlink is 302Mbps using 4*4 antennae while the uplink is 75Mbps using 2*4 antennae at 20MHz FDD and LTE R.10 has 1Gpbs on downlink while 300Mbps on uplink 2. WiMAX R1.0 has 46Mbps on downlink and 4Mbps on uplink while WiMAX R2.0 has 350Mbps on downlink and 200Mbps on uplink 12. channel bandwidth: LTE R.08 channel bandwidth is 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20MHz LTE R.10 it is aggregate of R.08. WiMAX R1.0: 3.5,5, 7, 8.75, 10MHz WiMAX R2.0 it is 5, 10, 20, 40MHz 13. Spectral Efficiency: LTE R.08: 1.91bps/Hz at downlink and 0.72bps/Hz at uplink w

LTE R.10: 30bps/Hz at downlink and 15bps/Hz on downlink. WiMAX R1.0: 1.9bps/Hz at downlink and 0.84bps/Hz at uplink WiMAX R2.0: 2.6bps/Hz at downlink and 1.3bps/Hz at uplink 14. Latency: LTE R.08: link layer < 5ms and Handoff < 50ms LTE R.10: Link layer < 5ms and Handoff < 50ms WiMAX R1.0: Link layer ~ 20 ms and Handoff ~ 35 to 50 ms WiMAX R2.0: Link layer < 10 ms and Handoff < 30 ms 15. VoIP capacity: LTE R.08: 80 users per sector/MHz (FDD) LTE R.10: > 80 users per sector/MHz (FDD) WiMAX R1.0: 20 users per sector/MHz (TDD) WiMAX R2.0: >30 users per sector/MHz (TDD)

Conclusion:
Both WiMAX and LTE have many differences and similarities but they can play an important role in deriving the 4G to the benefits of the users. ITU-T can use these technologies for the betterment of the broadband facilities and enhance the stadards of telecommunication by healthy competition.