PER-based analysis of a mobile WiMAX system

Among the 4G technologies that managed to impose is the IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX technology. Mobile WiMAX promises to deliver high data rates over wide areas and at vehicular speeds of up to 120 km/h. The performance of such a system is greatly influenced by the type of application desired to be supported, either TCP-based (FTP, web browsing) or UDP-based (video streaming). The current paper proposes to analyze and compare the performance of a fully compliant Mobile WiMAX system operating at 2.3 GHz in a vehicular multipath fading channel (ITU M.1225 Veh.A). The results are generated on a link speed basis and are expressed in terms of the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) switching points as well as the maximum achievable throughput and operating range. Different physical packet error rate (PER) requirements are considered, based on the quality of service (QoS) level imposed.