Performance assessment of OFDM-based IEEE802.16 physical layer employing different channel adaptation regimes

Albeit not too long has passed from IEEE802.16 standard emergence, but this wireless technology is about to revolutionize the broadband wireless industry. This technology is designed to provide wireless last-mile broadband access in metropolitan area networks (MAN), delivering performance comparable to traditional cable, DSL or T1 offerings. The proposed physical layer (PHY) standard, which is based upon OFDM as the mandatory technology, supports an extensive range of options. In the presented research we have modeled and evaluated the performance of this standard taking into account different PHY channel adaptation configurations, which comprise an assortment of adaptive modulation (AM) schemes and different channel estimation policies for coded and uncoded systems. Our results will quantitatively demonstrate the effect of using diverse AM methods under different PHY scenarios over BER and throughput performance of IEEE802.16a PHY.