Bridging solutions for a heterogeneous WiMAX-WiFi scenario

Recently, the metropolitan area network (MAN) has attracted much attention in telecommunication research and has emerged as one of the most important research topics in the community. Several standards representing the first step for developing metropolitan networks have been published; IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) has taken a relevant role in reaching the goal of realizing a full-service network all over a urban and suburban area. At the same time, the wireless local area networks (WLAN) have been widely used for in-home or short range communications, mainly basing on the IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) standard. A consequence is the increasing interest in interworking technology, that allows an interconnection between different standards by maintaining certain properties, mainly in terms of quality of service (QoS). One of the major issues is to design bridging devices capable of transparently interconnect different wireless technologies. In this paper, we propose two interconnection bridging solutions between WiMAX and WiFi links; the first is more based on the concept of maintaining a certain end-to-end QoS level independently from the wireless technologies used. The second method is more devoted to the reduction of the implementation complexity at the cost of no QoS assurance. The performance of the two methods are compared by resorting to computer simulations showing the advantages of each one technique.