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WiMAX The Past, Present and Future in a Nutshell

Sandeep Puthanpurayil
Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki ABSTRACT the spectral range which WiMAX is supposed to support has either already been distributed or have been reserved by the carriers for the dedicated purposes [1]. Apart from the IEEEs 802.16 standard, WiMAX also complies with European Telecommunications Standards Institutes (ETSI), High Performance Metropolitan Area Network (HiperMAN) [1]. WiMAX promises to be the alternative for the DSL and Cable for the last mile broad band access [2]. The WiMAX forum also believes that the standardization of the WiMAX technology will also improve the business aspects related to it, by allowing the manufacturers in bulk production of standard compliant products and components and thus bringing down the cost of production, which can then be presented to the end consumer as a price deduction. II. FUNDAMENTALS AND BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF WIMAX The figure below showcases the initial idea of implementation of WiMAX technology to be utilized for Internet access. The carrier base stations which are connected to Internet would use WiMAX to enable communication between them and the consumer antennas. In the future, WiMAX may act as a backbone for the Wi-Fi hot spots and thus can be a cheaper alternative to the wired Wi-Fi backbones which are currently being used [1].

IRELESS NETWORKS have become increasingly popular these days, as the necessity for mobility has increased multiple folds in the recent years. Wireless access to the internet has become the buzzword in the current scenario, wherein the users demand for being online always has become more a mandate or a minimum requirement, than a mere option. Most of the gadgets and devices available in the market today are being manufactured to support wireless data transmission and as we move forward, seemingly this demand and support is only going to grow in the future. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), based on IEE 802.16 standards, is one such technology or type of wireless network supporting wireless transmission of data. WiMAX is one of the wireless solutions that overcome the generic infrastructural problems encountered in the wired network deployment. It inherits the point-to-multipoint wireless networking standard. The transmission range of WiMAX networks could be as long as 30 miles with transmission rates of approx. 75 Mbps per channel. The driving force behind the promotion of this technology and the related products is a non-profit organization, the WiMAX Forum. It is also responsible to drive the interoperability between different variations of the WiMAX standard. This paper details how the WiMAX works, the fundamentals and characteristics of WiMAX networks, the performance details and enhancements, the security threats in WiMAX networks, the Services that are supported, the infrastructure and implementation details of the WiMAX networks, current challenges and about the prospective future of the technology. I. INTRODUCTION In the recent years, the world has experienced how the WiFi technology was accepted and put into use widely. The data rates in the traditional Wi-Fi networks based on IEEE 802.11 standard, ranges somewhere around 11 Mbps per channel. However the variations of this standard, IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g provide better data transmission rates of around 54 Mbps [1]. This development of the variations of the IEEE 802.11 standard clearly shows that there is a necessity or demand for better data transmission rates. So, WiMAX could be one of those options providing better data transmission rates, ie., up to 75 Mbps per channel on both up and down links [1]. It is supposed that the spectrum or the spectral range which is most suitable for the WiMAX networks is 3.5 GHz, followed by 5.2-5.8 GHz band [2]. However, there have been claims that

Figure 1: Base stations using WiMAX technology for communication [1] Technical Aspects: IEEE 802.16 splits its MAC layer into different sub layers which in turn supports various transmission technologies such as IPv4, IPv6, Ethernet and asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) [1].

2 Different variations of WiMAX/IEEE 802.16 standard are supposed to operate in different transmission spectrums. The vanilla version of IEEE 802.16 standard operates in the 10 to 66 GHz range. The variations of this standard, IEEE 802.16a, IEEE 802.16b, IEEE 802.16c, IEEE 802.16d operates in the frequency ranges of 2 to 11 GHz, 5 to 6 GHz, 10 to 66 GHz and 2 to 11 GHz respectively [1]. The initial IEE 802.16 standard, popularly known as WiMAX was based on the line-of-sight transmission (LOS) mode. This mode of transmission might not be the most favorable in the urban areas where achieving LOS might although not be impossible, but would need an infeasible and expensive approach involving heavy hardware expenses. The next version or variation of this standard was 802.16 a, which supports non line-of-sight (NLOS) transmission. This addresses the implementation issues related to urban deployment discussed above. The higher data transmission rates in WiMAX are achieved through the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This splits the broadband channels into minute narrowband channels, assigning different frequencies to them, allowing the transmission of parts of messages simultaneously across these channels [1]. This in a way is similar to CDMA, wherein different levels of Quality of Service (QoS) are provided to different users based on different code spreading factors [3]. Although these narrowband channels are very closely packed to each other, the interference is supposed to be almost completely avoided due to the way these channels are placed orthogonally against each other [1] vendors like Intel who manufacture WiMAX chipsets and are on a verge of promoting this way forward. One of the prominent challenges that the chipset vendors would have to consider and accordingly cope up with during the design and manufacture of WiMAX chipsets is the powerful radio sections that can cause overheating and in a way also affect the working of the networking components [1]. There have been few devices in the market already provided with WiMAX chipset, even few which are directly certified by the WiMAX Forum. Intel seems to have also capability to come up with chipsets that would support both the Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies simultaneously [1]. III. BROADBAND WITH WIMAX Different variations of IEEE 802.16: As we have seen in the previous sections, there exist several variations of the IEEE 802.16 standards. Each of these variations addresses certain areas of improvements over the vanilla version of the parent standard. They all operate in different frequency ranges or spectrum. The most interesting among all these variations is the IEEE 802.16e, which supports mobility [3]. One of the major drawbacks of initial IEEE 802.16 standard over the well known IEEE 802.11, more popularly known as Wi-Fi is the lack of mobility. IEEE 802.16e addresses this and has evolved as Mobile WiMAX, which supports communication possible even between users moving at vehicular speeds, through high-speed signal handoffs [1] The very first variation of IEEE 802.16 standard is IEEE 802.16a. As we have seen in the previous sections, it operates at lower frequencies. At these lower frequency ranges, the signals are supposed to even penetrate the barriers [1] and hence LOS, which was necessary for IEE 802.16 standard, will no more be a major concern anymore. The next variation IEEE 802.16b emphasizes more on the QoS aspects of WiMAX, dealing with prioritization of the voice and video transmission [1] The variation IEEE 802.16c is all about the standardization of the technology implementation and thus providing interoperability options. IEEE 802.16d is more or less similar to the IEEE 802.16a standard, but with minor improvements. It stresses more on the performance enhancement features to the uplink [5]. IEEE 802.16e is based on the scalable OFDM (SOFDM) in contrast with the IEEE 802.16s OFDM. This also brings in improvements in bandwidth efficiency and frequency reuse [3] IV. WIMAX VS WI-FI IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi is one of the very successful and widely

Figure 2: A potential WiMAX infrastructure [3] WiMAX Chipsets: Now that we understand the capabilities of WiMAX, the next step would be to know how in reality this could be implemented and its benefits forwarded to the end-user. One of the most important steps in this front would be to have powerful chipsets supporting the WiMAX technology. There are several established vendors, including giant chipset

3 implemented wireless connectivity based technology. It is so broadly deployed that every communication device ranging from personal computers, smart phones, videogame consoles, printers, laptops, PDAs and other peripherals that boasts of wireless connectivity, supports Wi-Fi technology or are so called Wi-Fi enabled - out of the box. Nevertheless, all the devices or peripherals that support Wi-Fi or are Wi-Fi compliant may or may not be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, but this does not much seem to bother any end user who wills to experience the Wi-Fi capable devices. One of the reasons for the success of Wi-Fi technology is its cost-effectiveness. However, it is arguable whether the wide usage of the technology has brought in the cost-effectiveness as a side effect or it could be the other way round. The maximum data rate of IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi is 11Mbps per channel and the variations of this standard such as IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g provide higher data rates up to 54Mbps. A typical IEEE 802.11 b or IEEE 802.11 g wireless router may cover a transmission range of few hundred feet only. Anything away from this transmission range, or more popularly known as hot-spot, means low performance or even connection drops. Wi-Fi does not very much support mobility, or say does not ensure connectivity while on a move at vehicular speeds. This is largely due to the low transmission range of just few hundred feet. So, in most of the cases Wi-Fi technology is best suitable for the indoor connectivity and usage. Compared to Wi-Fi, WiMAX provides a much better mobility solution at decent data transmission rates. The figure below shows that WiMAX as an optimal solution for speed-mobility matrix. There is a difference between WiMAX and Wi-Fi standard at the architectural level. In IEEE 802.11, the MAC protocol is based on contention access [3], where in each subscriber has to compete with one another to gain access to the Access point. The ones away from the access point will have a poor data connection, meaning lower performance when compared to a subscriber closer to the access point. But whereas the WiMAX or IEEE 802.16 standard follows a scheduled mechanism to split the access to different users and is more flexible in this terms, hence providing better QoS for the users with specific needs of accessing different services [3] WiMAX and Wi-Fi has quite different QoS aspects and are worth to put under comparison. QoS mechanism in WiMAX is based on connections between the base station and the user device. Each connection is based on specific scheduling algorithms. On the other hand, the QoS mechanism in Wi-Fi is similar to fixed Ethernet. This is based on the priority allocation to different types of data packets [4] Comparatively, deploying WiMAX as a replacement for WiFi may be a challenging because of the fact that the number of users having Wi-Fi enabled devices in the market is very huge and replacing them all with WiMAX enabled devices will not be an overnight task. Moreover, due to the wide acceptance of Wi-Fi, the costs to manufacture the Wi-Fi chipsets have come down drastically. Thus, it is now very much affordable for the end user. So, instead of ideas to wipe away and replace the Wi-Fi technology and the Wi-Fi compliant devices completely by WiMAX, a better and intelligently feasible approach would be to utilize and combine both these technologies in such a way that all the stake holders - the end user, service providers and chipset manufacturers would be benefitted.

Figure 3: Comparison - WiMAX and others [8] In the figure above, it clearly shows that Wi-Fi is the least recommended technology when Mobility comes into the factors affecting the choice. And all the options such as GSM and UMTS have issues with transmission speeds. A very viable solution that addresses both mobility and decent transmission speeds is WiMAX.

Figure 4: WiMAX and Wi-Fi integrated infrastructure [3] This could be achieved by clubbing these two strong technologies seamlessly. The idea would be to utilize Wi-Fi to reach the end user and WiMAX to handle the backhauling part [2]. In other words, WiMAX could be used as the backbone which is connected to the Internet and in turn connecting various Wi-Fi hotspots, enabling them access to the Internet.

4 In a way, this will also reduce the cost burden on the end user, as they need not bother about upgrading their devices to support WiMAX communication, as such. Combining these technologies will address the needs of both outdoor and indoor connectivity. For instance, combining the IEEE 802.11e and IEEE 802.16e would bring in an environment as shown in the Figure 4. In this figure, it shows how an end user performs a hand over between an IEEE 802.16e network to an IEEE 802.11e network. Challenges: In general there are certain challenges that come up while deploying the WiMAX technology. It ranges from the allocation of spectrum in which WiMAX operates, cost of deployment due to the LOS needs and also the costs involved at the end user side to switch to WiMAX enabled devices. There have been claims that the spectral range which WiMAX is supposed to support has either already been distributed or have been reserved by the carriers for the dedicated purposes [1]. Even the approach of integrating Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies for optimization purposes, has its own challenges that need to be addressed. One is being ensuring the seamless hand over between these two infrastructures, with minimum disruption and performance degradation. This would involve QoS violations at the application level between these two platforms. Another challenge could be the rerouting of the packets between the WiMAX base station and the Wi-Fi access point. This again involves the QoS aspects in terms of data transmission latency. This could however be solved through very intelligent routing algorithms or protocols that are interoperable between different wireless technologies or platforms [3]. Although there are several challenges in deploying the WiMAX technology as we have seen in previous sections, if properly deployed considering both engineering and economy aspects, WiMAX can be on par with the cable and DSL technologies in terms of the cost for access service to the end users. Deployment of any communication or broadband system must keep in mind the costs involved and also the Quality of Service aspects. Each these aspects are as important as the other. The end-user must be provided with a decent level of quality of service at an affordable cost. This should be the driving force behind the deployment of any communication or broadband system. Nevertheless it goes unsaid that it should also benefit all the stake holders, such as the service providers and operators as well. Ignoring any of the mentioned aspects would impact the commercial deployment and usage of the system, in a negative way. Backhaul infrastructure planning and Radio Capacity Planning are two important areas that need to be closely monitored for deployment of an effective WiMAX system [2]. In a study conducted by Gunasekaran and Harmantziz and presented in a paper Affordable Infrastructure for Deploying WiMAX Systems: Mesh v. Non Mesh, they have presented a model for an effective deployment of the WiMAX infrastructure. They have used Infrastructure Mesh for their study. Infrastructure mesh in contrary to ad-hoc or client mesh networks is a type of mesh where subscriber nodes do not forward packets. It is also more secured, predictable and easier to manage than a normal mesh network. There exist different mesh systems through which WiMAX can be deployed, but a very detailed analysis based on the advantages and disadvantages each of them carry with them, should be made while choosing one system while deploying an option. In their study, they have considered different topologies from one hop to three hops for the analysis. As shown in the Figure 5, there exists one Main base station surrounded by six Mesh base stations and all of them are connected wirelessly. In this architecture the Main BS aggregates all the traffic from the Mesh base stations and then takes them via wired backhaul to the POP or user.

V. IMPLEMENTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE One of the reasons why IEEE 802.16 and its variations have become famous is due to the fact that it ensures larger area coverage and also inexpensive equipment at the subscribers end. As discussed earlier, WiMAX does not only serve the residential users but also can be used as a backhaul for the WiFi hot spots and also as backhaul for the conventional cell towers [2], thus minimizing the conventional backhaul costs which are involved in the currently very widely used Wi-Fi communication systems deployment.

5 Figure 5: Mesh cluster of 7 hops with one Main base station and 6 mesh base stations or 1:6 setup [2] The following figure shows a setup with a cluster of 37 base stations, one among them being Main base station and the rest being mesh base stations VI. WIMAX SECURITY AND SERVICES Two major areas that need to be addressed properly before wider commercial and practical deployment of WiMAX wireless communication system are: a. b. Security Support for existing and upcoming Services

Security: There are certain generic security areas that the WiMAX networks should address such as Confidentiality, Authentication, Integrity and Availability. Confidentiality should be ensured such that no sensitive user data is accessible by anyone or anything unauthorized. This is one of the bare minimum security requirements that any wired or wireless communication system or technology should address. Authentication is required to restrict any unauthorized entry into the network and to ensure legitimacy. Integrity should be another area that needs attention. It should be confirmed that the data that is being exchanged is reliable and has not been altered by any unauthorized parties. Availability is yet another important security aspect for WiMAX networks, similar to any other communication system. It should be ensured that no unauthorized user gets access to the network and launch security attacks into the network. Thus, the legitimate users should always be access the services of the network. Some of the known security threats against the WiMAX networks based on the earlier research are Base Station or Mobile Station masquerading and management message eavesdropping and modification, jamming and data traffic modification [10] Most of the studies related to the IEEE 802.16 or WiMAX, has been revolving around the MAC layer [9]. But providing security only in the MAC layer would not make the WiMAX networks, threat proof and completely secured. With only security at MAC layer, it is almost next to impossible to save the WiMAX networks from attacks such as Denial-of-Service attack, which would adversely affect the availability of the network. [9] [10] Apart from security at the MAC layer, additional measures like Secure Routing and Key Management at the network layer would make the WiMAX mesh networks more reliable and secure. Figure 7: Comparison of different topologies in terms of Main base station and mesh base stations [2] Key management: To ensure safe and reliable communication channel between the clients and the server in the WiMAX environment it is essential to have a Key management system providing a unique key for every session between the client and the server [9]. One very optimal solution would be to have a setup where

Figure 6: Mesh cluster of 37 hops with one Main base station and 36 mesh base stations or 1:36 setup [2] A 1:6 setup case would need more base stations (50) in comparison to a 1:36 setup, which would need only 10 base stations [2]. In the figure 9, it shows the split between the main and mesh base stations for different mesh topologies. The conclusion that could be drawn from the figure is that deeper the mesh becomes lesser would be the necessity for the number of Main base stations. Based on this study, it was analyzed that the mesh topologies would incur less backhaul costs than non mesh topologies. This model however also involves certain drawback in terms of cost effectiveness. In this model the Main base station would have higher tower leasing costs and spectrum requirements and moreover deeper the mesh, more the operating costs involved [2].

6 a Mobile Station which wants to establish a reliable communication channel with the server can send the key or its parts to the server, through multiple paths. As each path may contain only a part or portion of all the information related to the key, the probability of the key material being intercepted by an unauthorized party can be significantly very low. Although if any part of the key is intercepted, the unauthorized party has to make sure that all the related parts of the key are possessed to intercept the actual communication between the client and the server or to launch any kind of communication attack. The basic areas of Services that the WiMAX communication system must ensure Internet access, Group communication; Content based distribution, Quality Guaranteed applications and Multihoming applications [9]. Internet access will be the basic expectation over the WiMAX network. Achieving Group communication and its services such as video conferencing, means utilization of technologies like Multicast [9]. Metropolitan Area Distributed Services can be achieved though Manycast Routing [9]. When the services are hosted and distributed across different servers, in Multicast routing system, the client issues just the name of the service as a request and then can be served by a subset of servers, thus resulting in improved reliability. Figure 9 illustrates how the client tries to access the servers 14 simultaneously to gain the required service The Content based distribution is such a service, where the network layer takes care of the routing of the message to interested recipients based on the content of the message. So the sender need not specify the destination or receiver information during transmission. Figure 8: Multipath routing [9] Secure Routing: The routing algorithm to be used over the WiMAX broadband system should take into consideration some important factors such as nodes having multiple radio interfaces, applications needing more than one destination, multi path routing where there might be a need to forward a message to various destinations and also layout more paths as shown in the Figure 8. Last but not the least, the heterogeneity of the devices involved in the network. The Network Coding Technique may be an applicable solution in providing secure routing and providing the optimal solution while reducing the computational complexity. . Figure 10: Multi-path routing to ensure better QoS [9] Similar to other wireless communication systems, even WiMAX is prone to errors and hence can affect the performance at times. Multi-path routing could be a solution to achieve better QoS levels for the available services [9]. It is supposed to provide better quality than a single-path routing. Figure 10 shows the multi-path routing works. VII. PERFORMANCE AND ENHANCEMENTS One of the main reasons for the evolving broadband access technologies and improvements through variations to these technologies is to support ever growing demand for the multimedia services [7]. Multimedia services like media streaming and VoIP has seen a huge demand in the recent times. Each of the evolving broadband technologies try to improve the QoS guarantees to such real time services and applications, which are mostly associated to the multimedia, but not only to it meaning more areas.

Figure 9: Manycast Routing between subsystem of routers and the client [9] Services:

Table 1: Various enhancements techniques to the improve performance of WiMAX [5] There have been studies made by Arunabha Ghosh et. al on the current performance of WiMAX and also some suggestions provided to ensure enhancements in terms of throughput, coverage area [5]. Their proposals have been summarized in the table above. VIII. FUTURE ASPECTS Although so far, the deployment of the WiMAX technology has not been very wide and popular as its counterpart WiFi, the future for it still seems to be promising. However, WiMAX Forum has estimated that there would be over 10 million WiMAX subscribers by the end o f 2009 and has much bigger plans and estimates of having a user base of over 130 million, by 2013. According to the recent statistics collected by the WiMAX forum, it is estimated that well over 500 WiMAX networks have already been deployed across 145 countries [6]. One among them is Yota, which is claimed to be the largest wireless network [4]. Yota is a wireless network based on the Mobile WiMAX technology and operating under the IEEE 802.16 e standard. It is deployed in some major cities of Russia. There are plans in place to spread the deployment of this network across 180 cities in Russia, to serve a user base of over 200 000 pretty soon [6]. Going forward, there is a huge expectation built around IEEE 802.16 m, or more prominently know as the Mobile WiMAX Release 2. IEEE 802.16m systems can provide four times faster data speed than the current Mobile WiMAX Release 1 [6], which is based on IEEE 802.16e technology. Apart from this, there exist several other enhancements, which ensure much efficient communication. Apart from the earlier presented variations of IEEE 802.16 standard, there exists one more interesting variation, IEEE 802.16j which expands the previous single-hop 802.16 standards to include multi-hop capability. Nevertheless, the purpose of IEEE 802.16j is not to standardize a new cellular network that includes multi-hop capability but just to add the multi-hop capability to WiMAX system [11] It is expected that the WiMAX Release 2 will be available commercially during the 2011-2012 timeframe [6]. The very promising and interesting aspect of Mobile WiMAX release 2 is the backward compatibility with the Release 1 devices and services. This ensures easy transition of the Release 1 solutions to Release 2 and at the same time supporting the communication between Release 1 and Release 2 devices. The WiMAX Release 2 promises improved VoIP capacity, spectral efficiency, latency, handover speed, cell range, and coverage, as well [6]. In February 2009, the WiMAX Forum originally projected that WiMAX technology would reach 800 million POPs or users by the end of 2010. However, by the end of 2009 the statistics showed that the earlier estimates have been exceeded and already in 2009 there have been WiMAX networks covering more than 620 million users. Now, the latest estimate by the WiMAX Forum is that it would be over one billion by the end of 2011. This would approximately the time competitive 4G technologies are expected to begin early commercialization [6]. IX. CONCLUSION This paper has given a wide overview of IEEE 802.16 standards family or WiMAX, which is considered to be an emerging Wireless communication system providing higher data rates across higher data transmission ranges. With ever evolving variations of the IEEE 802.16 standard with several enhancements, the commercial deployment of WiMAX technology at a very large scale, seems to become a reality very soon. Even the statistics provided by the

8 WiMAX Forum listed in the above section proves that WiMAX will see the light of commercial deployment at very affordable costs in the very near future. At the deployment end, there have been success stories in Asia Pacific, Central/Latin America, Africa/Middle East, Europe and North American. There is even an increase in the support from the service providers end, including some big players. However, according to the WiMAX Forum and the other industry experts, the main driver of WiMAXs growth and acceptance in 2010 will be the increase in consumer products including tri-band smart phones and feature phones with global roaming capabilities, which would flood the markets. Already many hardware vendors like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung and Toshiba have come up with devices with embedded WiMAX chipsets. Smart devices supporting both GSM and Mobile WiMAX with additional features like VoIP support in the WiMAX environment would be the key for the consumer attraction.

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