WiMax – a Overview

Telecommunication System 2 By: Cristóvão Gaspar

Rui Oliveira
 WiMAX - Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave
Access

 based on the IEEE 802.16 standard

 "WiMAX" was created by the WiMax Forum, which

was formed in June 2001 to promote conformity
and interoperability of the standard

 Goal: The goal of WiMAX is to provide high-speed

Internet access in a coverage range several
kilometres in radius
 OFDM-based
physical layer Scalable Adaptive
bandwidth modulation and
Transmission and data rate coding (AMC)
Rate

Orthogonal Link-layer
frequency division
multiple access
WiMax retransmissions

(OFDMA)
Support
for TDD
and FDD
Quality-of-service advanced
IP-based
antenna
architecture
techniques
 Frequency-Division Multiplexing (FDM)
◦ Data sent across various frequency channels.
◦ Guard bands used to avoid interference between channels
◦ Not very spectrally efficient.
◦ Examples are AM radio, and analog TV transmission

A B C D E F G H I J

Subchannel BW
Guard Band frequency
 Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing

 FDM where carriers are appropriately spaced to insure

orthogonality.

 Spectrally efficient !
Why Orthogonality is so great ?

 Transmit waveform for a given subchannel is orthogonal

to that of the remaining subchannels.
 Same concept of CDMA signals having orthogonal
spreading codes.

 At the receiver, an individual subchannel’s data can be

demodulated without interference from the others.

 Allows the receiver, in principle, to deal with each

subchannel separately.
WiMAX supports Automatic Retransmission reQuests (ARQ)
IEEE 802.16-2004 and IEEE 802.16e-2005 supports both Time Division
Duplexing and Frequency Division Duplexing.

FDD

TDD
-Transmitter and receiver operate on the same frequency but at different
times

-TDD systems reuse the filters, mixers, frequency sources and

synthesizers
-The transmitter and receiver operates at different carrier frequencies.

-The station must be able to send and receive a transmission at the

same time, and does so by slightly altering the frequency at which it
sends and receives.

-This mode of operation is referred to as duplex mode or offset mode.

-An FDD system uses a duplexer and/or two antennas that require
spatial separation and, therefore, cannot reuse the resources. The
result is more costly hardware.
-Mobile WiMAX uses OFDM as a multiple-access technique.

-Different users can be allocated different subsets of the

OFDM tones
Multiple-Antenna Techniques : beam forming, space-time coding,
and spatial multiplexing.