WiMAX

Krishna Mevawala(07BEC047)
Institute Of Technology, Nirma University
Ahmedabad, India.
07bec047@nirmauni.ac.in
krishnamevawala@gmail.com
Abstract- WiMAX is the most important and immerging multimedia chats and mobile entertainment. In addition, the
technology. The air interface of WiMAX technology is based on WiMAX connection can be used to deliver content to
the IEEE 802.16 standards. This paper gives the information multimedia gadgets such as the iPod.
about the Wimax technology In this paper first you would be
informed about the basic information about wimax and then
overview about the architecture of Wimax networking. This Overview of State-of-the-art WiMAX Technology:-
chapter is intended to provide a high-level overview of the
current mobile WiMAX technology with an emphasis on the 1. Structure:-
Physical layer and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer
features.

Keywords- Introduction, Structure, Key physical features,

OFDMA, TDD, Key Mac features, Evolution path, Key
Requirements of IEEE 802.16m, Conclusion.

Introduction:-
WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for
Microwave Access. WiMAX technology enables ubiquitous
delivery of wireless broadband service for fixed and/or
mobile users, and became a reality in 2006 when Korea
Telecom started the deployment of a 2.3 GHz version of
mobile WiMAX service called WiBRO in the Seoul
metropolitan area to offer high performance for data and Figure 1.1 Mobile WiMAX Release 1.0 products and
certification.
video. In a recent market forecast published in April 2008,
WiMAX Forum Subscriber and User Forecast Study, the As stated earlier, mobile WiMAX products and
WiMAX Forum projects a rather aggressive forecast of more certification follow the IEEE 802.16 air interface
than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012 (WiMAX specifications. The network specifications of mobile
Forum, 2008c). The WiMAX Forum also claims that there WiMAX products, however, are being developed
are more than 250 trials and deployments worldwide. internally by the WiMAX Forum, which include the end
The air interface of WiMAX technology is based on the to-end networking specifications and network
IEEE 802.16 standards. In particular, the current Mobile interoperability specifications. The NetworkWorking
WiMAX technology is mainly based on the IEEE 802.16e Group (NWG) within the WiMAX Forum is responsible
amendment (IEEE, 2006a), approved by the IEEE in for these network specifications, some of which involve
December 2005, which specifies the Orthogonal Frequency Access Service Network (ASN) control and data plane
Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) air interface and protocols, ASN profiles, Connectivity Services Network
provides support for mobility. (CSN) mobility support, Authentication, Authorization
and Accounting (AAA) interworking with other
technologies, and various services such as Location
Selection of features:- Based Service (LBS), Multicast and Broadcast Service
The selection of features to be implemented in WiMAX
(MCBCS) etc. In this chapter, however, we will focus on
systems and devices is presented in the mobile WiMAX
the overview of mobile WiMAX technology from the air
System Profile Release 1.0 (WiMAX Forum, 2007) which
interface perspective.
was developed in early 2006 and is currently maintained by
Figure 1.1 presents the aforementioned composition
theWiMAX Forum. The flexible bandwidth allocation and
of the current mobile WiMAX technology, commonly
multiple built-in types of Quality-of- Service (QoS) support
referred to as Release 1.0 profile. Its air interface
in the WiMAX network allow the provision of high-speed
Internet access, Voice Over IP (VoIP) and video calls,
 specifications consist of four related IEEE 802.16
Broadband Wireless Access Standards.
Not all of the optional features defined in these
IEEE Standards are implemented in WiMAX products
and tested for certifications. Through extensive technical
investigation analysis to build up the best competitive
products, the WiMAX Forum Technical Working Group
(TWG) published the first version of mobile WiMAX
System Profile Release 1 in early 2006 (WiMAX Forum,
2007). The latest published version to date (Release 10
rev. 1.6.1) incorporated error fixes and minor corrections
without touching the main features selected in the first
revision.
2. Physical features:-
Scalable OFDMA:-
OFDMA is the multiple access technique for mobile
WiMAX. OFDMA is the Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) based multiple access scheme and has
become the de-facto single choice for modern broadband
wireless technologies adopted in other competing
technologies such as 3GPP’s Long Term Evolution (LTE)
and 3GPP2’s Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB). OFDMA
demonstrates superior performance in non-line-of-sight (N-
LOS) multi-path channels with its relatively simple
transceiver structures and allows efficient use of the available
spectrum resources by time and frequency subchannelization.
The simple transceiver structure of OFDMA also enables
feasible implementation of advanced antenna techniques such
as MIMO with reasonable complexity.
TDD:-
The mobileWiMAX Release 1 Profile has only TDD as the
duplexing mode even though the baseline IEEE Standards
contain both TDD and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD).
Even though future WiMAX Releases will have FDD mode
as well, TDD is in many ways better positioned for mobile
Internet services than FDD.
First of all, Internet traffic is asymmetric typically with
the amount of downlink traffic exceeding the amount of
uplink traffic; thus, conventional FDD with the same
downlink and uplink channel bandwidth does not provide the
optimum use of resources. With TDD products, operators are
capable of adjusting downlink and uplink ratios based on
their service needs in the networks. In addition, TDD is
inherently better suited to more advanced antenna techniques
such as Adaptive Antenna System (AAS) or Beamforming
(BF) than FDD due to the channel reciprocity between the
uplink and downlink.
Advanced Antenna Techniques:-
Various advanced antenna techniques have been
implemented in the mobile WiMAX Release 1 profile to
enable higher cell and user throughputs and improved
coverage. As a matter of fact, mobile WiMAX was the first
commercially available cellular technology that actually
realized the benefits of MIMO techniques promised by
academia for years. With its downlink and uplinkMIMO
features, both operators and end-users enjoy up to twice the
data rates of Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) rate,
resulting in up to 37 Mbps for downlink and 10 Mbps for
uplink sector throughput using just 10 MHz TDD channel
bandwidth.
Frequency Reuse One and Flexible Frequency
Reuse:-
From the operators’ perspective, securing greater frequency
spectrum for their services is always costly. Naturally it is in
their best interest if a technology allows decent performance
in the highly interference-limited conditions with frequency
reuse one. Mobile WiMAX technology was designed to meet
this goal in a respectable way with its cell-specific
subchannelization, low rate coding and power boosting and
deboosting features. It also enables real-time application of
flexible frequency reuse where frequency reuse one applied
to terminals close to the cell center whereas a fraction of
frequency is used for terminals at the cell edge, thereby
reducing heavy co-channel interference.
3. MAC Features:-
Connection-based Data Transmission with
Classification and QoS:-
TheWiMAX technology provides an environment for
connection-oriented services. For each service, certain
classification rules are specified to define the category of
traffic associated with the connection. For example, it could
be Internet Protocol (IP) traffic destined for a specific IP
address/port. For each connection, certain QoS parameters
are defined, for example, the minimum reserved rate and
maximum sustained rate. There are several types of
scheduling such as real-time services that can be applied
based on the application requirements. A special scheduling
type (ertPS) is defined for the VoIP service with silence
suppression and adaptive codecs.
Scheduled Transmissions:-
Bandwidth allocation mechanism is based on real time
bandwidth requests transmitted by the terminals, per
connection. Bandwidth requests may be transmitted using a
contention based mechanism or they can be piggybacked
with the data messages. The Base Station executes resources

allocation based on the requests and QoS parameters of the
connection.
MAC Overhead Reduction:-
WiMAX technology includes support of the general Purpose
Header Suppression (PHS) and IP Header Compression
(ROHC). PHS can be used for packets of virtually any format
such as IPv4 or IPv6 over Ethernet. It is beneficial if a
considerable part of the traffic has identical headers which
are typical for IP or Ethernet destination addresses. The PHS
mechanism replaces the repeated part of the header with a
short context identifier, thus reducing the overhead associated
with headers.
Handover:-
Handover procedures include numerous means of
optimization. In particular, to reduce time expenses for the
mobile to find the central frequency and acquire parameters
of the neighbor base station, the mobile can apply a scanning
process when the mobile is away from the serving base
station to scan the wireless media for neighbor base stations.
Information collected during scanning such as central
frequencies of the neighbor base stations can then be used in
actual handover. In some deployment scenarios, scanning can
be performed without service interruption. For this purpose,
information about the central frequency and parameters of the
neighbor base stations is periodically advertised by the
serving base station.
Power Saving: Sleep Mode:-
Sleep mode is the primary procedure for power saving. In
sleep mode the mobile is away from the base station for
certain time intervals, normally of exponentially increasing
size. During these intervals the mobile remains registered at
the base station but can power down certain circuits to reduce
power consumption.
Power Saving: Idle Mode:-If the mobile has no traffic for
a long time it can switch to idle mode in which it is no longer
registered at any particular base station. To resume traffic
between the network and the mobile, a paging procedure may
be used by the network.
Figure 1.2 Roadmap of mobileWiMAX standards and products.
Security:-
The security sublayer provides Extensible Authentication
Protocol (EAP)-based mutual authentication between the
mobile and the network. It protects against unauthorized
access to the transferred data by applying strong encryption
of data blocks transferred over the air. To keep the encryption
keys fresh, the security sublayer employs an authenticated
client/server key management protocol which allows the base
station to distribute keying material to mobiles. Basic
security mechanisms are strengthened by adding digital
certificate-based Subscriber Station (SS) device
authentication to the key management protocol.
WiMAX Evolution Path:-
Figure 1.2 provides an overview of mobile WiMAX
roadmaps for standards and products. The first release
labeled as Release 1.0 is described earlier in this chapter. The
other two, Releases 1.5 and 2.0, are short-term and long-term
migration, respectively, and their brief summaries are
provided in this section. The corresponding IEEE baseline
standards for Releases 1.5 and 2.0 are IEEE 802.16 REV2
(IEEE, 2008) and IEEE 802.16m (IEEE, 2006b),
respectively. Owing to the dependency on the ongoing IEEE
standards, REV2 and 16m, the schedules of Releases 1.5 and
2.0 are projections by the authors and may change. Each new
generation of the technology needs changes in the profile
and/or the standard itself.
TABLE I
KEY REQUIREMENTS OF IEEE 802.16M.
Item Requirement
Carrier frequency Licensed band under 6
GHz
Operating bandwidth 5-20 MHz
Duplex Full-duplex FDD, Half-
duplex FDD, TDD
 Antenna Technique Downlink ≥ (2Tx, 2Rx) Uses:-
Uplink ≥ (1Tx, 2Rx)  Providing portable mobile broadband connectivity
Data latency Downlink < 10 ms, across cities and countries through a variety of
Uplink < 10 ms devices.
State transition latency max 100 ms  Providing a wireless alternative to cable
and DSL for "last mile" broadband access.
Handover interruption Intra-frequency handover
 Providing data, telecommunications (VoIP)
time latency <30 ms
and IPTV services (triple play).
Inter-frequency handover
 Providing a source of Internet connectivity as part of
latency <100 m a business continuity plan.
MBS Inter-base station distance
0.5 km> 4 bps/Hz
WiFi vs. WiMAX:-
Spectral efficiency Inter-base station distance
1.5 km> 2 bps/Hz
 WiMAX is a long range system, covering many
Position accuracy Network-based: 100 m kilometres, that uses licensed or unlicensed
(67% of cdf), 300 m (95% spectrum to deliver connection to a network, in most
of cdf) cases the Internet.
Packet data rate `Table-II  Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum to provide access to
a local network.
TABLE III  Wi-Fi is more popular in end user devices.
Packet Data Rate  Wi-Fi runs on the Media Access
Control's CSMA/CA protocol, which is
Type Link MIMO Data connectionless and contention based, whereas
Rate(bps/Hz) WiMAX runs a connection-oriented MAC.
Baseline Downlink 2*2 8.0  WiMAX and Wi-Fi have quite different quality of
Uplink 1*2 2.8 service (QoS) mechanisms:
Target Downlink 4*4 15.0  WiMAX uses a QoS mechanism based on
connections between the base station and the user
Uplink 2*4 5.6 device. Each connection is based on specific
scheduling algorithms.
Extended and Enhanced Networking Features:-  Wi-Fi uses contention access - all subscriber stations
that wish to pass data through a wireless access
point (AP) are competing for the AP's attention on a
Most of the extensions are related to MBSs. The Release 1.5 random interrupt basis. This can cause subscriber
extension provides for more flexible allocation of MBS zones stations distant from the AP to be repeatedly
which is suitable also for small (micro and pico) cells. interrupted by closer stations, greatly reducing their
Another attractive part of Release 1.5 is the set of features throughput.
supporting LBSs.  Both 802.11 (which includes Wi-Fi)
and 802.16 (which includes WiMAX) define Peer-
Support forWiMAX and WiFi: Bluetooth to-Peer (P2P) and ad hoc networks, where an end
Coexistence in the Same Mobile:- user communicates to users or servers on
another Local Area Network (LAN) using its access
Special attention is paid to provide more efficient support to point or base station. However, 802.11 supports also
WiMAX terminals having additional wireless Local Area direct ad hoc or peer to peer networking between
Network (LAN) and/or Personal Area Network (PAN) end user devices without an access point while
interfaces. As the timing of WiFi or Bluetooth interfaces does 802.16 end user devices must be in range of the base
not match the timing of the WiMAX interface, special station.
arrangements are needed to, for example, prevent the
Bluetooth transmitter from interfering with the WiMAX
receiver and vice versa.
REFERENCES:
1. SPECTRUM SYSTEMS: FROM OFDM AND MC-CDMA TO
LTE AND WIMAX, 2ND EDITION, JOHN W ILEY & SONS,
2008.
2. Data communication and networking by Forozone
3. IEEE (2007) IEEE 802.16m. System Requirements,
4. http://www.wirelessman.org/tgm/docs/802
16m-07_002r4.pdf, October.
5. WiMAX Forum (2007) WiMAX Forum Mobile System
Profile Release 1.0 Approved Specification.
6. www.techonline.com