Performance Evaluation of WiMAX System in Various Morphological Scenarios

Wafaa Taie, Ahmed S. Ibrahim, Ashraf H. Badawi, and Hani Elgebaly

Intel Corporation, Egypt, and Center of Excellence for Wireless Applications (CEWA), Saudi Arabia. {wafaax.taie, ahmedx.s.ibrahim, ashraf.h.badawi, hani.elgebaly}@intel.com
Abstract In the recent years, the WiMAX cellular system has been greatly deployed worldwide as it can provide high data rate to mobile subscribers. However, a few works has been done to characterize the behavior of the WiMAX network in different deployment scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the WiMAX system in various morphological scenarios, namely, dense urban, urban, and sub-urban. Moreover, we evaluate the behavior of the WiMAX system with different environment parameters such as cell radius, penetration loss, and receiver antenna gain. For each WiMAX scenario, relevant set of performance criteria such as the spectral efciency is evaluated via system level simulations (SLS). Finally, this paper provides understanding and insights on the main design parameters affecting the performance of WiMAX systems.

I. I NTRODUCTION Recently, there has been a great interest in deploying the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) cellular system in various countries across the globe such as Japan, Russia, Saudia Arabia, and USA [1]. The mobile WiMAX system, which is based on the IEEE 802.16e air interface standard [2], aims to provide high data rate broadband services with high Quality-of-Service (QoS) to mobile subscribers. Furthermore, the WIMAX system is an all-IP network, and it needs such broadband capability to provide many services such as VoIP, Mobile TV, and internet-related services. The merits of the WiMAX communication system are signicantly due to utilizing the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) physical layer technologies [3], [4]. The OFDM technology mitigates the multi-path fading phenomenon in wireless channels. Further, the MIMO technology can provide robust communication via achieving diversity gain, or high data rate via achieving spatial multiplexing gain. From the medium access control (MAC) perspective, the WiMAX system utilizes the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme, which optimally allocates the available time-frequency resources among all the active subscribers. Finally, the WiMAX system has a scalable bandwidth, which facilitates the deployment conditions in different countries. While there is a great interest in deploying WiMAX worldwide due to its merits, there are relatively few published works that study the performance of the WiMAX network. For instance the authors of [5] have studies the impact of antenna conguration and channel coding on the performance of the WiMAX network. In [6], different scheduling schemes such as maximum throughput and round robin were evaluated. In addition to the theoretical evaluation, there has been also experimental evaluation for deployed WiMAX networks. For

instance in [7], the performance evaluation of a xed WiMAX network deployed in the city of Tulsa, OK, USA, at the 4.9GHz public safety band was presented. In these previous works, there was no consideration for some important factors that can affect the behavior of the WiMAX system, for instance different cell radii and how it is related to noise-limited versus interference-limited scenarios, and what the optimal cell radius for a particular environment could be. These questions and more represent our motivation for the work presented in this paper. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the WiMAX system in various morphological scenarios, namely, dense urban, urban, and sub-urban. Such deployment scenarios vary in some parameters such as cell radius and indoor penetration loss, which signicantly affect the performance of the WiMAX network. Moreover, we characterize the behavior of the WiMAX network as the cell radius increases and identify three distinct regions, namely, high interference, interferencelimited, and noise-limited. In each deployment scenario, the performance of the WiMAX system is determined via running SLS. The performance is evaluated via some important performance criteria, such as spectral efciency and user throughput. In addition to the performance evaluation, this paper provides understanding and insights on the main parameters affecting the WiMAX systems. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we give an overview of the SLS environment utilized in this paper. In Section III, the performance evaluation of the WiMAX network in various network congurations is presented. Finally, Section IV concludes the paper. II. S YSTEM L EVEL S IMULATIONS (SLS) In order to produce the results in this paper, we have utilized our proprietary system level simulator which follows the IEEE 802.16 Evaluation Methodology document [8] for the downlink. In this section, we give an overview of the SLS including the system parameters and performance metrics. The SLS models 19 hexagonal cells, each cell has a base station (BS) at its center and 3 non-overlapping sectors. We consider 10 independent monte carlo trials and in each one, 10 subscriber stations (SSs) are uniformly deployed in each sector. The simulation duration in each monte carlo trail is 300 frames, and each frame duration is 5 msec. The independent monte carlo trials provide averaging process over the placement of the users, while the multiple frames provide time averaging over the channels variation. Table I shows the network conguration parameters.

978-1-4244-3574-6/10/$25.00 2010 IEEE

Parameter Number of cells Sectors per cell SSs per sector Frames per trial Number of trials Carrier frequency Reuse factor Cell load

Value 19 3 10 300 10 2.5 GHz 1x3x1 100%

TABLE I Network conguration parameters.

Parameter System bandwidth FFT size Subcarrier spacing Data sub carriers CP length OFDMA symbol duration Permutation Frame duration Sub-channels/Frame OFDMA symbols/Frame OFDMA DL:UL ratio
TABLE III

Value 10 MHz 1024 10.9375 KHz 720 1/8 102.86 u sec PUSC 5 ms 30 47 29:18

Parameter Channel model Path loss Antenna conguration Max BS tx power BS antenna pattern BS antenna gain BS antenna spacing SS antenna pattern SS antenna gain SS antenna spacing Cable loss Detection Scheduling Noise gure MCS

Value Extended ITU mixed PedB (3km/h) and VehA (30 and 120 km/h) 130.19+37.6log10(d) dB (d in km) 22 40 dBm 70 (-3 dB) with 20 dB front-to-back ratio 18 dB 4 wavelength Omni-directional 0 dB 0.5 wavelength 1.5 dB MMSE Proportional fairness 6.5 dB QPSK (R=1/12, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4), 16-QAM (R=1/2, 3/4), 64-QAM (R=1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6)

OFDMA parameters.

Cell radius (km) Penetration loss (dB) Shadowing standard dev. (dB) Sector throughput (Mbps) Spectral eff. (bps/Hz/Sector) Mean user throughput (Kbps)

Dense urban 0.86 18 8 7.09 1.15 709

Urban 1.26 15 8 6.72 1.09 672

Sub-urban 3.01 12 7 4.96 0.8 496

TABLE IV Simulation parameters and performance metrics of the three morphological areas.

TABLE II System model parameters.

number of information bits per second that the sector can successfully deliver. The spectral efciency (in bps/Hz) can be obtained by dividing the aggregate sector throughput by the effective channel bandwidth as R , (1) SE = W tr where R is the aggregate sector throughput, W is the total bandwidth, and tr is the downlink time ratio, which is equal to 29/47 as in Table III. III. W I MAX P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION In this section, we evaluate the performance of the WiMAX network in various deployment scenarios with different cell radii and penetration losses. Moreover, we characterize the behavior of the WiMAX network, as the cell radius changes. Further, we illustrate the impact of some of the input parameters such as penetration loss and SS receive gain on the WiMAX performance. For each of these scenarios, we calculate the spectral efciency and the average user throughput. A. Morphological Scenarios In this sub-section, we study the performance of the WiMAX network in various morphological scenarios, namely, dense urban, urban, and sub-urban. Each deployment area is distinguished by its cell radius, indoor penetration loss, shadowing standard deviation, as shown in Table IV. In Table IV, it is shown that the maximum spectral efciency and similarly the sector and user throughputs are achieved in the dense urban scenario, while the minimum spectral efciency is achieved in the sub-urban scenario. The spectral efciency values in Table IV can be explained by illustrating the SINR and SNR distributions of the users shown in Fig. 1. The SNR distribution depends mainly on the

Each SS (or user) experiences slow fading phenomenon, such as shadowing and path loss, as well as fast fading channel behavior. The SLS models the evolution of the desired signal and interference received by the SS in time, and employs a PHY abstraction model to predict the link layer performance. Then, a suitable Modulation and Coding scheme (MCS) is assigned based on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) value. Table II depicts the system model parameters. Each user is allocated one or more slots based on proportional fairness (PF) scheduling criterion. For a system bandwidth of 10 MHz, the available resources in each downlink sub-frame are 30 frequency sub-channels and 24 OFDM symbols. In our SLS and as an example, we set the minimum allocated resource unit for each user to be 6 frequency subchannels and 24 OFDMA symbols, resulting in a total of 5 available resources per frame. Table III shows the OFDMA air interface parameters in details. The SLS provides a large list of performance criteria including the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the users signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and SINR distributions, users average throughput, MCS probability density function, Hybrid Automatic Repeat request (HARQ) retransmission probability, aggregate sector throughput, and nally the system spectral efciency. The aggregate sector throughput is dened as the

1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 CDF 0.5 Suburban 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 15 Dense urban Suburban, SINR Distribution Urban, SINR Distribution Dense urban, SINR Distribution Suburban, SNR Distribution Urban, SNR Distribution Dense urban, SNR Distribution Solid: SINR Dashed: SNR Black: Suburban Blue: Urban Red: Dense urban

Urban

Fig. 3.

User MCS probability distribution.

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10 15 20 SNR or SINR (dB)

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Fig. 1. SNR and SINR distributions CDF for the three morphological areas.
1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 CDF 0.5 Dense urban 0.4 0.3 Urban 0.2 0.1 0

Suburban Suburban Urban Dense urban

Fig. 4.

User HARQ probability distribution.

200

400

600

800 1000 1200 User throughput (Kbps)

1400

1600

1800

Fig. 2.

User throughput CDF for the three morphological areas.

SS received signal power, which varies signicantly with the path loss and consequently with the cell radius. Hence, there is a horizontal shift between the SNR curves corresponding to the three morphological areas in accordance with the corresponding cell radius. In Fig. 1, it is also shown that the SINR distributions for the dense urban and urban are close. We note that the SINR distribution depends not only on the desired signal power, but also on the interfering signals powers. We notice that there is a dramatic reduction of the SINR distributions compared to the SNR distributions in the cases of small to moderate cell radii (such as dense-urban and urban). Such scenarios represent interference-limited scenarios, in which the interference is the dominant factor affecting the link performance as opposed to the noise. Hence, although the dense urban scenario results in higher SNR distribution compared to the urban case, we nd that both scenarios have approximately the same SINR distribution. On the contrary we nd that in the high cell radii (e.g. suburban), the SNR distribution has low values, and there is a small gap due to the interference in the SINR curve. Hence, the noise is the dominant factor in the sub-urban case, and hence it represents a noise-limited scenario. In the following, we show that there is difference in the behavior between the interference-limited and noise-limited scenarios. The SINR distribution affects directly the user throughput, which is shown in Fig. 2. As shown, the dense urban scenario has the highest CDF compared to the other two scenarios. Finally, we note that in Table IV, the average user throughput

equals the aggregate sector throughput divided by the number of users per sector (10 SS/sector). In other words, the sector throughput is divided almost equally across all the randomlydeployed users, which is due to utilizing the proportional fairness scheduling scheme. The WiMAX system provides link adaptation, by choosing the proper MCS mode according to the channel quality, which is proportional to the SINR value. In particular, the WiMAX system with 2 2 antenna conguration provides 19 MCS modes, which are divided into two sub-groups. The rst subgroup consists of 11 MCS modes, which are listed in Table II and are achieved using 2 2 space-time block code (STBC) scheme. The second sub-group consists of the last 8 MCS modes, which correspond to spatial multiplexing (SM) mode with utilizing 2 spatial streams. Fig. 3 depicts the probability distribution of the utilized MCS in each deployment scenario. As shown for all the deployment scenarios, the SM models happens with low probability compared to the STBC modes. This is because the SM modes correspond to high SINR, which happens to small percentage of users. Finally, we show the probability of HARQ retransmission in Fig. 4. As shown, about 95% of the transmissions do not require an HARQ retransmission. Moreover, the HARQ retransmission distribution is almost independent of the morphology. B. Spectral Efciency Behavior Characterization As noted in Table IV, the spectral efciency varies from high value for the dense urban scenario to lower value experienced in the sub-urban case. In this section, we characterize the behavior of the spectral efciency as the cell radius varies. Fig. 5 shows the spectral efciency values for different cell radii. As shown for the indoor case, the spectral efciency behavior can be divided into three regions, namely, high interference, interference-limited, and noise-limited regions. In the high interference region (less than 100m), there is a low spectral efciency due to the high interference impact. In

1.25 Average SINR (dB) 1.2 1.15 Spectral efficiency (bps/Hz/sector) 1.1 1.05 High 1 interference impact 0.95 0.9 0.85 0.8 Interference limited region Indoor Outdoor

9 8.5 8 7.5 7

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

Spectral efficiency (bps/Hz/sector)

1.25 1.2 1.15 1.1 1.05 1 500 1000 1500 Cell radius (m) 2000 2500 3000

Noise limited region

500

1000

1500 Cell radius (m)

2000

2500

3000

Fig. 5.

Spectral efciency for the indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Fig. 6.

Spectral efciency and SINR for the outdoor scenario.

the interference-limited region (200m- 1000m), the spectral efciency curve varies slightly and achieves the highest possible spectral efciency value. We nd that within this region there is a balance between the desired signal power and the interference power. Finally in the noise-limited region (greater than 1000m), the spectral efciency decreases as the cell radius increases due to decreasing the desired signal power. Moreover, it is shown that the optimum cell radii for the indoor case, at which the spectral efciency is maximized, are equal to 250m and 750m. The same spectral efciency behavior, which includes the three different regions, will always happen irrespective of the simulation input parameters. For instance, Fig. 5 also depicts the spectral efciency performance of the outdoor case with zero penetration loss. As shown, changing the simulation parameters results in a scaled and shifted curve of that of the indoor curve, however, the spectral efciency curve still experiences the three behavioral regions. As shown, the optimum cell radius for the outdoor case is 750m. From a network design perspective, it is highly desirable that the indoor and outdoor scenarios have the same optimum cell radius of 750m, as there will be one cell size which is optimized for both indoor and outdoor users. However, there is no guarantee that this will be always the case if the deployment environment is changed. In order to understand the reason of having such behavior in the spectral efciency, we show the average SINR for the outdoor case in Fig. 6. For each cell radius, we plot the average of the SINR values of all the users in the network. As shown, the spectral efciency curve behave in a similar fashion to that of the average SINR. Hence, the variation of the SINR is the main responsible of having such behavior in the spectral efciency curve. The interference-limited region is of special interest as there is non-monotonic behavior in that region, and it can be explained by focusing on the SINR expression as follows. We assume that the WiMAX network has a total of K cells. In addition, we assume that a particular SS is deployed in the main cell (cell index number 1). The SS experiences a series of gain (e.g. Tx/Rx antenna gains) and loss (e.g. path loss, shadow, and penetration loss) factors. Let G1 denote the effective path gain (all gains - all losses) from the desired cell

(number 1) to the SS. Of special interest among the gains/losses is the path loss, as it depends on the distance between the BS and SS (denoted as d1 ). Simply, the effective gain can be modeled as G1 (d1 ) = const L(d1 ) , where const is a constant value that includes all the xed (i.e. distance-independent) gains and losses. In addition to the desired signal, the SS receives co-channel interference (CCI) from the neighboring cells (a total of K 1) that are using the same time-frequency channels. Similar to the desired signal, the received signal from the k-th interfering cell experiences effective path gain (or loss), which is denoted as Gk . Therefore, the received SINR at the SS can be calculated as P G1 (d1 ) , (2) = K k=2 P Gk (dk ) + No where P is the BS transmission power, which is the same for all the BSs, dk is the distance between the k-th BS and the SS, and No is the noise variance. In (2), it is shown that the SINR depends on the distances from the SS to all the neighboring cells. In general, there is no monotonic (increasing or decreasing) behavior of the SINR in (2), as it depends on the interaction among the transmission power and distances from the main and all the interfering cells. Whenever all of these factors play non-negligible roles (as in the interference-limited region), we get such ups and downs in the average SINR curve. We expect that there will be always such behavior consisting of three regions in the SINR and hence the spectral efciency. We found that in the indoor and outdoor cases by changing the penetration loss to 12dB and 0dB, respectively. Denitely, the dips (how many, where, their values) will depend on the specic input parameters and simulation scenarios. But, in general we expect three distinct regions: 1) High interference (small radius), which should be avoided, 2) Interferencelimited (medium radius), which is the dense-urban case, and 3) noise-limited (large radius), which is the sub-urban case. Finally, Fig. 5 sheds the light on the tradeoff between achieving larger coverage (i.e. higher cell radius) and reducing the spectral efciency (and hence lower the data rate). C. Impact of Power Gains In the currently available WiMAX components, subscriber can utilize Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), which can

CPE Rx gain Dense urban Urban Sub-urban

0 dB 1.15 1.09 0.8

6 dB 1.15 1.09 0.94

CDF

1 0 dB Rx gain 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 6 dB Rx gain 0.3 Solid: SINR Dashed: SNR Blue: 0 dB Rx gain Red: 6 dB Rx gain

TABLE V Impact of CPE receive gain on the spectral efciency (in bps/Hz/Sector) of the three deployment scenarios.
1 0 dB Rx gain 0.9 0.8 0.7 6 dB Rx gain 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 10 SINR Distribution (0 dB Rx gain) SINR Distribution (6 dB Rx gain) SNR Distribution (0 dB Rx gain) SNR Distribution (6 dB Rx gain) Solid: SINR Dashed: SNR Blue: 0 dB Rx gain Red: 6 dB Rx gain

SINR Distribution (0 dB Rx gain) SINR Distribution (6 dB Rx gain) SNR Distribution (0 dB Rx gain) SNR Distribution (6 dB Rx gain)

0.2 0.1 0 15

10

5 10 SNR or SINR (dB)

15

20

25

30

Fig. 8. SNR and SINR CDF distributions for the sub-urban morphology with different receive gains.

CDF

the cell radius by 1km, which is equivalent to 33% increase in the coverage area, while guaranteeing the same spectral efciency.
50

10

20 SNR or SINR (dB)

30

40

Fig. 7. SNR and SINR CDF distributions for the dense urban morphology with different receive gains.

IV. C ONCLUSION In this paper, we have evaluated the performance of the WiMAX communication system in three morphological scenarios, which are dense urban, urban, and sub-urban. We have shown that the highest spectral efciency is achieved in the dense-urban case (1.15 bps/Hz/Sector), while the lowest spectral efciency is achieved in the sub-urban case (0.8 bps/Hz/Sector). Moreover, we have characterized the behavior of the spectral efciency criterion with the cell radius into three distinct regions, which are 1) High interference (small radius), which should be avoided, 2) Interference-limited (medium radius), which is the dense-urban case, and 3) noise-limited (large radius), which is the sub-urban case. We have identied the optimum cell radius to be equal to 750m for both the indoor and outdoor scenarios. Finally, it was shown that additional receive gain of 6dB in the sub-urban case (noiselimited) achieves 20% increase in the spectral efciency or 33% increase in the cell radius. R EFERENCES
[1] Wimax maps, Available online at http://www.wimaxmaps.org/. [2] IEEE 802.16e, IEEE standard for local and metropolitan area networks part 16: Air interface for xed and mobile broadband wireless access systems, 2005. [3] J. G. Andrews, A. Ghosh, and R. Muhamed, Fundamentals of WiMAX, Prentice Hall, 2007. [4] The WiMAX Forum, Mobile WiMAX - part I: A technical overview and performance evaluation, Feb. 2006. [5] S. Tiraspolsky, A. Rubtsov, A. Maltsev, and A. Davydov, Mobile WiMAX - deployment scenarios performance analysis, Proc. 3rd International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS06), pp. 353 357, Sep. 2006. [6] A. Maltsev, A. Pudeyev, and A. Maltsev Jr., Multiuser frequency domain scheduling for WiMAX OFDMA, Proc. 16th IST Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit, pp. 1 4, Jul. 2007. [7] N. LaSorte, W. J. Barnes, B. Zigreng, and H. Refai, Performance evaluation of a deployed WiMAX system operating in the 4.9GHz public safety band, Proc. IEEE 6th Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC09), pp. 1 5, Jan. 2009. [8] The WiMAX Forum, WiMAX system evaluation methodology, Jul. 2008.

have receive (Rx) gain of 6 dB. In this sub-section, we investigate the potentials gains of having 6dB Rx gain at the SS in the three deployment scenarios considered in Section III-A. Table V shows the spectral efciency of indoor case with receive gains of both 0dB and 6dB. As shown, the receive gain has no impact on the urban and dense urban scenarios, while it increases the spectral efciency of the sub-urban scenario. These ndings can be explained by investigating the SINR CDF distributions of the SSs in each deployment scenario. Fig. 7 depicts the SNR and SINR CDF distributions of the SSs with CPE receive gain of both 0dB and 6dB for the dense urban morphology. As shown, the SINR CDF distribution does not change by increasing the CPE receive gain to 6dB. We note that any power gain (e.g. CPE receive gain) affects both the desired signal and the interference signals by the same weight. Therefore, in interference-limited scenarios the SINR distribution does not change because of additional power gains. We note in Fig. 7 that the SNR, on the other hand, improves signicantly with increasing the CPE receive gain. In the sub-urban scenario, the CPE receive gain signicantly increases the SINR as shown in Fig. 8. Unlike the interferencelimited case, in noise-limited scenario (e.g. sub-urban) any power gain can increase the SINR and consequently increase the spectral efciency. As shown in Table V, CPE gain of 6 dB achieves 20% increase in the spectral efciency for the sub-urban case. We have shown above that the extra 6dB receive gain can increase the spectral efciency in the sub-urban morphology. Alternatively, it can extend the cell radius without reducing the spectral efciency below that at 3.01 km. Considering a cell radius of 4 km and CPE receive gain of 6dB, the resulting spectral efciency is 0.85 bps/Hz/Sector. Such value is even higher than the default sub-urban case shown in Table IV with spectral efciency of 0.8 bps/Hz/Sector. Hence in the suburban case, the additional CPE receive gain of 6dB can extend