On the WiMAX robustness against interfering signals in emergency marine scenario

This paper presents some experimental results about the robustness of a WiMAX system against interfering signals. In particular, this work presents a WiMAX performance comparison when two different types of interfering signals were generated: a continuous wave and a rectangular pulsed wave. Both of them were tuned at the same working frequency of the WiMAX system (i.e. 2.55 GHz). The former is typical of some attackers or dud devices, the latter, instead, is very similar to the signals generated by radars. In this work IP throughput performance and the VoIP (voice over IP) perceived quality of service (QoS) were evaluated, when one of the two considered signals interfered the base station (BS) or the costumer premise equipment (CPE). The experimental results point out that the continuous wave was more critical than the pulsed one for the WiMAX system; in some situation it caused the complete disconnection of the CPE from the BS or the BS outage.