Performance Evaluation of WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) Physical and MAC Layer

Abstract

Fixed Broadband Wireless Access is a promising technology which can offer high speed voice, video and data service up to the customer end. IEEE 802.16 Wireless- MAN standard specifies a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and a set of Physical (PHY) layers to provide fixed and mobile Broadband Wireless Access in broad range of frequencies. Based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, WiMAX allows for an efficient use of bandwidth in a wide frequency range, and can be used as a last mile solution for broadband internet access. The WiMAX forum has adopted IEEE 802.16 OFDM PHY layer for the equipment manufacturer due to its robust performance in multi- path environment. The thesis investigates the performance of IEEE 802.16 OFDM PHY layer and MAC layer. The aim of this thesis is to implement the features of the WiMAX OFDM physical layer specified in IEEE 802.16-2004 in MATLAB. In order to combat the temporal variations in quality on a multipath fading channel, modulation and coding tech- niques are used. These techniques employs multiple modulation and coding schemes to instantaneously adapt to the variations in the channel SNR, thus maximizing the system throughput and improving BER performance. The thesis gives an overview about the WiMAX standard and studies the performance of a WiMAX transmitter and receiver with tremendous increase in data services and real time applications over networks. IEEE 802.16 has been designed to support QoS for continuous and burst traffic. A unique set of QoS parameters such as delay, bandwidth etc are associated with each MAC level service flow. In order to better support QoS scheduling mech- anisms are required for downlink and uplink flow. Hence an efficient Qos scheduling architecture for complete system is required to maintain QoS and fairness for different types of uplink and downlink flows.