Coexistence and Interworking of IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.11(e)

The coexistence and interworking of IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.11 is an acute problem. The frame-based medium access of 802.16 requires rigorous protection against interference from wireless local area networks in order to operate properly. The 802.11e enhancements of the medium access control of 802.11 introduce the capability to support QoS. These enhancements define a central entity as main element: the hybrid coordinator. It realizes a contention free, centrally controlled medium access and introduces QoS limitations to the contention based access of 802.11e. In this paper, a central coordinating device combines the central base station of 802.16 with the hybrid coordinator of 802.11e and is thus referred to as base station hybrid coordinator. The base station hybrid coordinator is capable to operate in an 802.16 and an 802.11(e) protocol mode in the same frequency band. The realization of the interworking between these two standards is discussed and evaluated in this paper