Friday, August 17, 2012

WiMAX PHY

The 802.16 PHY supports TDD and full and half-duplex frequency-division duplex (FDD) operations; however, the initial release of mobile WiMAX only supports TDD. Other advanced PHY features include adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), hybrid ARQ (HARQ), and fast channel feedback (CQICH) to enhance coverage and capacity of WiMAX in mobile applications.

For the bands in the 10 – 66 GHz range, 802.16 defi nes one air interface called Wireless MAN-SC. The PHY design for the 2 – 11 GHz range (both licensed and unlicensed bands) is more complex because of interference. Hence, the standard supports burst-by-burst adaptability for modulation and coding schemes and specifies three interfaces. The adaptive features at the PHY allow trade-off between robustness and capacity. The three air interfaces for the 2 – 11 GHz range are:

● Wireless MAN — SCa uses single carrier modulation.

● Wireless MAN — OFDM uses a 256-carrier OFDM. This air interface provides multiple access to different stations through TDMA.

● Wireless MAN — OFDM uses a 2048-carrier OFDM scheme. The interface provides multiple access by assigning a subset of the carriers to an individual receiver.

Support for QPSK, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM are mandatory in the downlink with mobile WiMAX. In the uplink 64-QAM is optional. Both convolutional code and turbo code with variable code rate and repetition coding are supported. The combinations of various modulation and code rates provide a fi ne resolution of data rates. The frame duration is 5 ms. Each frame has 48 OFDM symbols with 44 OFDM symbols available for data transmission.

The base station (BS) scheduler determines the appropriate data rate for each burst allocation
based on the buffer size, channel propagation conditions at the receiver, etc. A channel quality indicator (CQI) channel is used to provide channel state information from the user terminals
to the BS scheduler.

WiMAX provides signaling to allow fully asynchronous operation. The asynchronous operation allows variable delay between retransmissions which gives more flexibility to the scheduler at the cost of additional overhead for each retransmission. HARQ combined with CQICH and AMC provides robust link adoption in the mobile environment at vehicular speeds in excess of 120 km/h.

Source of Information : Elsevier Wireless Networking Complete

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