An experimental investigation of VoIP and video streaming over fixed WiMAX

Despite the significant interest in WiMAX technology and deployment, there are very few publicly reported measurements from testbeds and field trials. As such, most WiMAX studies employ simulation and modeling. This paper contributes to our understanding of what is realistically possible using off-the-shelf fixed WiMAX equipment today. We employ multiple competing traffic sources over a point-to-multipoint WiMAX topology and measure the capacity of the WiMAX equipment to handle a multitude of VoIP flows between subscriber stations while delivering a variable number of video streams. We measure throughput, packet loss, and one-way delay for both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. For the one-way delay measurements we synchronize the clocks of all testbed hosts with a software-only, open source implementation of the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol. We compare these one-way delay measurements with those obtained when GPS-based synchronization is used.