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WiMAX

Sharad Bhatia Department Of ECE Global College Of Technology Sharadbhatia22@gmail.com

Abstract: Wireless networks have become increasingly popular these days, as the necessity for mobility has increased multiple folds in the recent years. Wireless access to the internet has become the buzzword in the current scenario, wherein the users demand for being online always has become more a mandate or a minimum requirement, than a mere option. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), based on IEE 802.16 standards, is one such technology or type of wireless network supporting wireless transmission of data. WiMAX is one of the wireless solutions that overcome the generic infrastructural problems encountered in the wired network deployment. The transmission range of WiMAX networks could be as long as 30 miles with transmission rates of approx. 75 Mbps per channel.
Keywords: IEEE 802.16e, mobile WiMAX, overheads.

II. FUNDAMENTALS AND BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF WIMAX

The figure below showcases the initial idea of implementation of WiMAX technology to be utilized for Internet access. The carrier base stations which are connected to Internet would use WiMAX to enable communication between them and the consumer antennas. In the future, WiMAX may act as a backbone for the Wi-Fi hot spots and thus can be a cheaper alternative to the wired Wi-Fi backbones which are currently being used .

I. INTRODUCTION
In the recent years, the world has experienced how the WiFi technology was accepted and put into use widely. The data rates in the traditional Wi-Fi networks based on IEEE 802.11 standard, ranges somewhere around 11 Mbps per channel. However the variations of this standard, IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g provide better data transmission rates of around 54 Mbps. This development of the variations of the IEEE 802.11 standard clearly shows that there is a necessity or demand for better data transmission rates. So, WiMAX could be one of those options providing better data transmission rates, ie., up to 75 Mbps per channel on both up and down links. It is supposed that the spectrum or the spectral range which is most suitable for the WiMAX networks is 3.5 GHz, followed by 5.2-5.8 GHz band. However, there have been claims that the spectral range which WiMAX is supposed to support has either already been distributed or have been reserved by the carriers for the dedicated purposes.

Figure 1: Base stations using WiMAX technology for communication. The initial IEE 802.16 standard, popularly known as WiMAX was based on the line-of-sight transmission (LOS) mode. This mode of transmission might not be the most favorable in the urban areas where achieving LOS might although not be impossible, but would need an infeasible and expensive approach involving heavy hardware expenses. The next version or variation of this standard was 802.16 a, which supports non line-of-sight (NLOS) transmission. This addresses the implementation issues related to urban deployment discussed above. The higher data transmission rates in WiMAX are achieved through the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

(OFDM). This splits the broadband channels into minute narrowband channels, assigning different frequencies to them, allowing the transmission of parts of messages simultaneously across these channels. This in a way is similar to CDMA, wherein different levels of Quality of Service (QoS) are provided to different users based on different code spreading factors. Although these narrowband channels are very closely packed to each other, the interference is supposed to be almost completely avoided due to the way these channels are placed orthogonally against each other.

The next variation IEEE 802.16b emphasizes more on the QoS aspects of WiMAX, dealing with prioritization of the voice and video transmission . The variation IEEE 802.16c is all about the standardization of the technology implementation and thus providing interoperability options. IEEE 802.16d is more or less similar to the IEEE 802.16a standard, but with minor improvements. It stresses more on the performance enhancement features to the uplink . IEEE 802.16e is based on the scalable OFDM (SOFDM) in contrast with the IEEE 802.16s OFDM. This also brings in improvements in bandwidth efficiency and frequency reuse. V. CONCLUSION WiMAX will see the light of commercial deployment at very affordable costs in the very near future. At the deployment end, there have been success stories in Asia Pacific, Central/Latin America, Africa/Middle East, Europe and North American. There is even an increase in the support from the service providers end, including some big players. However, according to the WiMAX Forum and the other industry experts, the main driver of WiMAXs growth and acceptance in 2010 will be the increase in consumer products including tri-band smart phones and feature phones with global roaming capabilities, which would flood the markets. Already many hardware vendors like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung and Toshiba have come up with devices with embedded WiMAX chipsets. Smart devices supporting both GSM and Mobile WiMAX with additional features like VoIP support in the WiMAX environment would be the key for the consumer attraction

Figure 2: A potential WiMAX infrastructure

III. BROADBAND WITH WIMAX DIFFERENT VARIATIONS OF IEEE 802.16: As we have seen in the previous sections, there exist several variations of the IEEE 802.16 standards. Each of these variations addresses certain areas of improvements over the vanilla version of the parent standard. They all operate in different frequency ranges or spectrum. The most interesting among all these variations is the IEEE 802.16e, which supports mobility. One of the major drawbacks of initial IEEE 802.16 standard over the well known IEEE 802.11, more popularly known as Wi-Fi is the lack of mobility. IEEE 802.16e addresses this and has evolved as Mobile WiMAX, which supports communication possible even between users moving at vehicular speeds, through high-speed signal handoffs. The very first variation of IEEE 802.16 standard is IEEE 802.16a. As we have seen in the previous sections, it operates at lower frequencies. At these lower frequency ranges, the signals are supposed to even penetrate the barriers and hence LOS, which was necessary for IEE 802.16 standard, will no more be a major concern anymore.

VI. REFERENCES
[1] E. Grenier. (March 2006). a quick guide to IEEE 802.16e radio-planning with ICS telecom. ATDI White Paper, McLean, VA.[Online]. Available:http://www.vsat.pl/data/files/WP_WiMAX_developmen ts_overview_060301.pdf [2] WiMAX Forum. (August 2006). Mobile WiMAXPart 1: A technical overview and performance evaluation. [Online]. Available:http://www.wimaxforum.org/news/downloads/Mobile_ WiMAX_Part1_Overview_and_Performance.pdf [3] Scalable OFDMA Engine for WiMAX Application, ALTERA WhitePaperVersion 2.1, May 2007. [4] Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, "Achieving Wireless Broadband with WiMax," Computer, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 10-13, June 2004 [5] Vinoth Gunasekaran, Dr. Fotios C. Harmantzis,- Affordable Infrastrcuture for Deploying WiMAX Systems: Mesh v. Non Mesh IEEE - 2005 [6] Bo Li, Yang Qin and Chor Ping Low, Choon Lim Gwee - A Survey on Mobile WiMAX, IEEE Communications Magazine, December 2007 [7] Wikipedia WiMAX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX

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