Evaluation of Path Loss Models at WiMAX Cell-Edge

WiMAX coverage range is one of the important factors that will affect the quality of broadband access services in mobile systems. Predicting and finding the path loss is essential in planning and designing cellular mobile systems. This paper presents a comprehensive study of path loss on mobile WiMAX which has been developed to provide high throughput and wide coverage to a large number of users. In this paper we have calculated, analyzed, compared the path loss values and determined the link budget, power outage probability and WiMAX cell coverage area. We consider the mobile WiMAX standard at one carrier frequency, namely 3.5GHz and a variation of distances in the range of 1 to 50 km, in flat rural, suburban and urban environments. The paper discusses and implements Okumura, Hata, Cost- 231, Ericsson, Erceg, Walfish, Ecc-33, Lee and the simplified free space path loss models. All the models applied in this paper are used to predict the propagation loss at WiMAX cell-edge.