Spectrum Allocation for WiMAX

The IEEE 802.16 specifi cation applies across a wide swath of RF spectrum. There is no uniform global licensed spectrum for WiMAX in the United States. The biggest segment available is around 2.5 GHz and is already assigned — primarily to Sprint Nextel. Elsewhere in the world, the most likely bands used will be around 3.5 GHz, 2.3/2.5 GHz, or 5 GHz, with 2.3/2.5 GHz probably being most important in Asia.

There is some prospect that some of a 700 MHz band might be made available for WiMAX in the United States, but it is currently assigned to analog TV and awaits the complete rollout of HD digital TV before it can become available, likely by 2009. There are several variants of 802.16, depending on local regulatory conditions and thus of which spectrum is used.

Mobile WiMAX based on the 802.16e standard will most likely be in 2.3 and 2.5 GHz frequencies — low enough to accommodate the NLOS conditions between the base station and mobile devices. The key technologies in 802.16e on PHY levels are OFDMA and SOFDMA. OFDMA uses a multicarrier modulation in which the carriers are divided among users to form subchannels. For each subchannel, the coding and modulation are adapted separately, allowing channel optimization on a smaller scale (rather than using the same parameters for the whole channel). This technique optimizes the use of spectrum resources and enhances indoor coverage by assigning a robust scheme to vulnerable links. SOFDMA is an enhancement of OFDMA that scales the number of subcarriers in a channel with possible values of 128, 512, 1024, and 2048.

802 .16e includes power-saving and sleep modes to extend the battery life of mobile devices. 802.16e also supports hard and soft handoffs to provide users with seamless connections as they move across coverage areas of adjacent cells. Other improvements for mobile devices include a real-time polling service to provide QoS, HARQ scheme to retransmit erroneous packets, and private key-management schemes to help with the distribution of encryption keys.

Source of Information : Elsevier Wireless Networking Complete