WiMAX Performance at 4.

9 GHz
Jim Martin, Mike Westall
School of Computing
Clemson University
jim.martin/westall@cs.clemson.edu
Presented at the 2010 IEEE Aerospace Conference
Big Sky, Montana on 3/10/2010
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This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Justice Grant 2006-IJ-CX-K035. The opinions and results
described in this presentation do not necessarily reflect the opinions or recommendations of the National Institute of Justice
or of the Department of Justice.
Outline
! Introduction setting the stage
! Background
! Related work
! Methodology
! Analysis and results
! Conclusions and future work
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Introduction
! WiMAX is a wireless network technology that can be deployed
on a small scale, a campus-wide scale, a city-wide scale, a
state-wide scale, or a national scale
! Our work explores the performance of WiMAX operating at 4.9
GHz in a University campus environment but the analysis and
general results are applicable to space exploration
802.16d provides large pipes that can serve as backhaul links
802.16e provides point-to-multipoint to support potentially many devices
operating latency/loss sensitive applications
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Background
! Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a
broadband wireless network technology with roots that go back to
Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service (MMDS).
! WiMAX specifies the MAC layer that manages the bandwidth and the
physical layer that defines how bits are sent over the medium.
! The spectrum (and laws of physics and government spectrum policies)
dictates the fundamental capabilities of a given WiMAX system.
Unlicensed : 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz
Sort of unlicensed: 3.65 GHz, 4.9 GHz
Licensed: 3.5 GHz, 2.5 GHz,
Emerging: 700 MHz
! Long history.today the IEEE 802.16 group handles the standards
evolution. The WiMAX Forum handles interoperability issues.
Profiles collect reasonable combinations of operating parameters, specific enough to
ensure equipment from different vendors can interoperate.
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Background
! WiMAX is a centralized protocol that involves a base station and
multiple subscriber stations.
! Current deployments are generally TDD. Future deployments will also
support FDD (separate upstream and downstream channels)
! Downstream is simple- point-to-multipoint.
! Upstream is more complex as there are multiple senders competing for
access. Upstream access is based on TDMA. Stations are told the
starting time of a transmission and the allowed duration.
! Five service classes have been defined: unsolicited grant service
(UGS), real-time polling service (rtPS), non-real-time polling service
(nrtPS), best effort (BE) and Extended real-time variable rate (ERT-VR)
service.
Difference primarily is in how requests for bandwidth are initiated and on the service
qualities associated with a given service.
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Related Work
! Early studies of WiMAX involved simple analytic models.
! More recent simulation-based studies focus on either IP packet
scheduling or scheduling over OFDM subchannels.
! There are several studies of WiMAX over operational networks.
However to the best of our knowledge no other study had control of the
network or knowledge from the vendor of implementation decisions.
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Motivations
! Interest by government agencies to use standards-based, widely
deployed protocols. WiMAX is clearly an option for space applications.
! WiMAX equipment is much less accessible to the research community
than other wireless technologies such as 802.11. Therefore, there are
very few studies that provide insight in how an operational WiMAX
network behaves.
! Given the complexity of a WiMAX system, models (analytic or
simulation) can only approximate the behavior of operational networks.
! The WiMAX standards purposefully do not specify specific scheduling
techniques. Therefore, implementations are likely to behave quite
differently.
Our goal was to characterize the performance of a particular WiMAX
implementation and to then correlate the results with expected results.
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Methodology
! Based on our equipment and configuration, we estimate the expected
TCP/UDP throughput assuming best-case conditions.
! Perform experiments on Clemonss WiMAX network to obtain achieved
results.
Used iperf at fixed locations that provided stable operation at a given modulation/
coding setting
! Embellish the results with an RF coverage analysis
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Clemsons WiMAX Network
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WiMAX Equipment
Base station : (1) 4.9 GHz Hardened BS (MAVM-VMXDB, Harris Corporation)
Client station: (4) 4.9 GHz Low Power Hardened Client (MAVM-VMCLH, Harris Corporation)
(2) Low Power EasyST CPE (AirSpan Corporation)
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Harris WiMAX Operating Parameters:
5 Mhz channel bandwidth
TDD operation
256 OFDM subchannels
1/8 guard interval
Symbol time: 50.0 usec
Frame time 0.01 seconds
192 usable symbols per frame (96 symbols for each direction assuming a 50/50 split)
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Frame Format
Expected Results
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In the best case, we find how much application data can be sent per frame time.
Assumptions:
A single best effort TCP flow that always has data waiting for transmission over the link
IP packets are concatenated and sent as a single burst
Ideal channel
Summary of results:
DS throughput ranges from 5.75 Mbps through 0.64 Mbps, US from 7.41 Mbps through 0.82 Mbps
DS has more overhead which explains the asymmetry
Achieved Results
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On campus, we were not able to establish a link at 64-QAM !
Achieved results were within 2% of expected results.
Discrepancy is partially due to the overhead associated with concatenation.
Highlights of the RF coverage analysis
Near line-of-sight was required, very sensitive to foliage
Coverage rarely exceeded a path distance of 0.5 miles (farthest distance that we
observed an operational link was 1.2 miles).
Conclusions
! Our work provides insight in how an operational WiMAX network
performs.
! Demonstrated that knowledge of equipments implementation choices
is required to precisely correlate empirical results with expected
results.
! Future work
For a WiMAX profile that is appropriate for space missions, how might this
support anticipated application performance requirements and scaling
requirements?
Space applications are likely to push standard protocols beyond their
intended capacity, what are these limits and explore modified or extended
variants of WiMAX?
It is likely that future space networks will be heterogeneous requiring
disparate types of wireless networks to interoperate. For example, how
can disparate systems such as 802.11, 802.16, and hybrid networks
interoperate?
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