Measuring and Analyzing WiMAX Security and QoS in Testbed Experiments

Providing strong security is necessary for any wireless access networks. The latest broadband access network implementations are based on WiMAX and LTE, since they support high data rate and mobility. The WiMAX network has well structured QoS mechanisms and security architecture to support all kinds of fixed, mobile and multihop network users. Even though the existing fixed WiMAX network has well defined security architecture, it has many security issues like rouge Base Station (BS), Denial of Service (DoS) and etc. The rouge BS issue was solved in mobile WiMAX network, but the other security issues in fixed WiMAX network and the issues related to mobility like handover latency issues still exist. Most of the existing security issues in fixed and mobile WiMAX networks are solved in the upcoming international mobile telecommunication (IMT) - Advanced WiMAX network. But there are still some security issues due to high mobility support and advanced Medium Access Control (MAC) functionalities. On the other hand, Internet service providers may use the Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) for their wireless access due to its popularity in wired network. But IPSec may affect the throughput performance, since the IPSec header in each packet consumes additional bandwidth. Little research based on real experiments has been reported comparing WiMAX standard security and IPSec. In this paper, the security supported by the standards and IPSec for fixed WiMAX network is evaluated using testbed experiments. From the experimental results and existing research efforts, the security level and QoS support of theoretical and practical security schemes are analyzed.