ECOM 5301 Senior I Theoretical Research about : WiMAX & QoS (original) (raw)

WiMAX-the (IEEE 802.16) Wireless MAN technology took a big step forward in February 2006 with the publication of the 802.16e amendment, Physical and Medium Access Control Layers for Combined Fixed and Mobile Operation in Licensed Bands. This mouthful may well announce the imminent arrival of Ethernet's tanks on the front lawns of the 3G operators, as it extends the industry's best-bet heavyweight metro broadband fixed-wireless access standard to nomadic and fully mobile terminals. And it does it with an extensive range of quality of service (QOS) capabilities. These QOS capabilities matter enormously. Without sophisticated QOS, many wireless services-from legacy data services to complex interactive IMS-based services-don't work as well as they could. But QOS in broadband wireless access is a difficult and complicated business, as it adds an unpredictable radio link and potentially heavy user contention to the usual non-deterministic behavior of IP packet networks. Carriers therefore need to be aware of how QOS works-and what it can do-in the different flavors of 802.16, and how it relates to the more familiar 3G technologies. And it's crucial to understand the extent to which 802.16 allows vendors wide scope for innovation in implementing improved algorithms for better QOS. This report aims to highlight the importance of over-the-air QOS in the WiMAX operator business case, and to look at the options for implementing QOS capabilities in WiMAX base-station equipment. WiMAX Standardization WiMAX is based on the 802.16d (or more formally 802.16-2004 or European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) HiperMAN) and 802.16e standards published in 2004 and 2006, respectively. The scope of these standards is fairly broad, but it is important to remember that they address only Layers 1 and 2 of the network. Higher-layer network architectures and interfaces are not defined by these standards, unlike the situation in the 3GPP and 3GPP2 specifications for 3G mobile networks, for example.