[Type text]

Using Beamforming and MIMO Technology

in WiMAX to Reduce Operational Cost
Gopalan.M.A.,
Department of EEE., R.M.D. Engineering College, Chennai
gopalrmd90@gmail.com,
PH: 9840700826
Deepak.M.
Department of ECE., R.M.D. Engineering College, Chennai
deepakm1989@gmail.com
PH: 9840219319

802.16e amendment (IEEE, 2006a),

Abstract: Today all countries are looking
for a economic, cost-effective, easy, fast-
to-deploy, and high performance,
affordable next generation broadband
systems. WiMAX is the next era for
communication brings a solution for this.
WiMAX is standardized by IEEE 802.16
group, for wireless networking. This
paper describes about the components,
the basic architecture, the merits, and the
demerits of this upcoming technology
along with a suggestion on cost effective
operation of the same.
I.INTRODUCTION:
Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave
Access (WiMAX) is a standards-based
wireless technology for providing high-
speed, last-mile broadband connectivity to
homes and businesses and for mobile
wireless networks. WiMAX technology
enables ubiquitous delivery of wireless
broadband service for fixed and/or mobile
users and the WiMAX Forum projects a
rather aggressive forecast of more than 133
million WiMAX users globally by 2012.
The air interface of WiMAX technology is
based on the IEEE 802.16 standards. In
particular, the current Mobile WiMAX
technology is mainly based on the IEEE
approved by the IEEE in December 2005,
which specifies the Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) air
interface and provides support for mobility.
The technology also provides shared data
rates up to 70 Mbps, which is enough
bandwidth to simultaneously support more
than 60 businesses with T1-type
connectivity, and well over a thousand
homes at 1-Mbps DSL-level connectivity.
Thus, WiMAX is obviously an exciting field
of study for anyone involved in Wireless
Networking. In the next few paragraphs we
will discuss about this new exciting
technology and about the protocols
governing it.
II.COMPONENTS OF A WiMAX
SYSTEM:
A WiMAX system consists of two parts,
namely, A WiMAX tower (similar in
concept to a cell phone tower) — a single
WiMAX tower can provide coverage to a
very large area, as big as 8000 sq km and A
WiMAX receiver — the receiver and
antenna could be a small box or Personal
Computer Memory Card International
Association (PCMCIA) card, or they could
be built into a laptop the way Wi-Fi access is
today.
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A WiMAX tower station can connect
directly to the Internet using a high
bandwidth, wired connection. It can also
connect to another WiMAX tower using a
(Line of Sight) LoS, microwave link. This
connection to a second tower (often referred
to as a backhaul), along with the ability of a
single tower to cover up to 3000 sq mi, is
what allows WiMAX to provide coverage to
remote rural areas.
Figure 1: Description of WiMAX
WiMAX actually can provide two forms of
wireless service:
There is the non-line-of-sight, where a
small antenna on your computer connects to
the tower. In this mode, WiMAX uses a
lower frequency range 2 GHz to 11 GHz.
Lower-wavelength transmissions are not as
easily disrupted by physical obstructions,
they are better able to diffract, or bend,
around obstacles. There is line-of-sight
service, where a fixed dish antenna points
straight at the WiMAX tower from a rooftop
or pole.
The line-of-sight connection is stronger and
more stable, so it's able to send a lot of data
with fewer errors. Line-of-sight
transmissions use higher frequencies, with
ranges reaching a possible 66 GHz. At
higher frequencies, there is less interference
and lots more bandwidth. Wi-Fi style access
will be limited to a 4-to-6 mile radius.
Through the stronger line-of- sight antennas,
the WiMAX transmitting station would send
data to WiMAX enabled computers or
routers set up within the transmitter's 30-
mile radius. The fastest WiMAX handles up
to 70 megabits per second, which, according
to WiMAX proponents, is enough
bandwidth to simultaneously support more
than 60 businesses with T1-type
connectivity and well over a thousand
homes at 1Mbit/s DSL-level connectivity.
III. IEEE SPECIFICATIONS FOR
WiMAX:
WiMAX is based upon the IEEE 802.16
WMAN technology family, which provides
specifications of the media access control
(MAC) layer and the physical (PHY) layer.
The 802.16 specification further subdivides
the MAC sub layer into three sub layers: the
convergence sub layer (CS), the common
part sub layer (CPS), and the security sub
layer. The CS aims to enable 802.16 to
better accommodate the higher layer
protocols placed above the MAC layer. The
802.16 specification assumes there will be
two predominant types of traffic transported
across the 802.16 network: ATM and IEEE
802.3 (Ethernet). Thus, there are two CS
specifications: ATM and packet. The CS
receives data frames from a higher layer and
classifies the frame. On the basis of this
classification, the CS can perform additional
processing, such as payload header
compression, before passing the frame to the
MAC CPS. The CS also accepts data frames
from the MACCPS.
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If the peer CS has performed any type of
processing, the receiving CS will restore the
data frame before passing it to a higher layer.
The CS is separate from the remainder of the
802.16 MAC such that vendors who wish to
support other protocols can develop
specialized CSs.
Figure 2:802.16 Protocol – Physical and Data
Link Layers
The CPS is the central piece of the 802.16
MAC, defining the medium access method
(Figure 1.1). The CPS provides functions
related to duplexing, network entry and
initialization, framing, quality of service
(QoS), and channel access. The security sub
layer, also referred to as the privacy sub layer,
has been designed to meet two primary goals:
providing subscribers with privacy across the
wireless network and providing operators with
strong protection from theft of service.
Consequently, the security sub layer has two
component protocols: an encapsulation
protocol and a privacy key management
protocol. The PHY layer then converts MAC
layer frames into signals to be transmitted
across the air interface. Let us discuss the
features of these layers in detail:
IV.KEY PHY FEATURES
In the following we give the key PHY features
of mobile WiMAX technology and provide
short descriptions.
A. Scalable OFDMA
OFDMA is the multiple access technique for
mobile WiMAX. OFDMA is the Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
based multiple access scheme and has become
the de-facto single choice for modern
broadband wireless technologies adopted in
other competing technologies such as 3GPP’s
Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 3GPP2’s
Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB). OFDMA
demonstrates superior performance in non-
line-of-sight (N-LOS) multi-path channels
with its relatively simple transceiver structures
and allows efficient use of the available
spectrum resources by time and frequency sub
channelization. The simple transceiver
structure of OFDMA also enables feasible
implementation of advanced antenna
techniques such as MIMO with reasonable
complexity. Lastly, OFDMA employed in
mobile WiMAX is scalable in the sense that by
flexibly adjusting FFT sizes and channel
bandwidths with fixed symbol duration and
subcarrier spacing, it can address various
spectrum needs in different regional
regulations in a cost-competitive manner.
B. TDD
The mobile WiMAX Release 1 Profile has
only TDD as the duplexing mode even though
the baseline IEEE Standards contain both TDD
and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD). Even
though future WiMAX Releases will have
FDD mode as well, TDD is in many ways
better positioned for mobile Internet services
than FDD. First of all, Internet traffic is
asymmetric typically with the amount of
downlink traffic exceeding the amount of
uplink traffic; thus, conventional FDD with the
same downlink and uplink channel bandwidth
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does not provide the optimum use of resources.
With TDD products, operators are capable of
adjusting downlink and uplink ratios based on
their service needs in the networks.
In addition, TDD is inherently better suited to
more advanced antenna techniques such as
Adaptive Antenna System (AAS) or Beam
forming (BF) than FDD due to the channel
reciprocity between the uplink and downlink.
Mobile Internet with increased multimedia
services naturally requires the use of advanced
antenna techniques to improve capacity and
coverage.
C. Advanced Antenna Techniques (MIMO
and BF)
Various advanced antenna techniques have
been implemented in the mobile WiMAX
Release 1 profile to enable higher cell and user
throughputs and improved coverage. As a
matter of fact, mobile WiMAX was the first
commercially available cellular technology
that actually realized the benefits of MIMO
techniques promised by academia for years.
With its downlink and uplink MIMO features,
both operators and end-users enjoy up to twice
the data rates of Single-Input Single-Output
(SISO) rate, resulting in up to 37 Mbps for
downlink and 10 Mbps for uplink sector
throughput using just 10 MHz TDD channel
bandwidth.
Mobile WiMAX also enhances the cell
coverage with its inherent BF techniques.
Coupled with TDD operation, its powerful BF
mechanism allows base stations to accurately
form a channel matching beam to a terminal
station so that uplink and downlink signals can
reach reliably from and to terminals at the cell
edge, thus effectively extending the cell range.
D. Full Mobility Support
Full mobility support is another strength of the
mobile WiMAX products. The baseline
standard of mobile WiMAX was designed to
support vehicles at highway speed with
appropriate pilot design and Hybrid Automatic
Repeat Request (HARQ), which helps to
mitigate the effect of fast channel and
interference fluctuation. The systems can
detect the mobile speed and automatically
switch between different types of resource
blocks, called sub channels, to optimally
support the mobile user. Furthermore, HARQ
helps to overcome the error of link adaptation
in fast fading channels and to improve overall
performance with its combined gain and time
diversity.
E. Frequency Reuse One and Flexible
Frequency Reuse
From the operators’ perspective, securing
greater frequency spectrum for their services is
always costly. Naturally it is in their best
interest if a technology allows decent
performance in the highly interference-limited
conditions with frequency reuse one. Mobile
WiMAX technology was designed to meet this
goal in a respectable way with its cell-specific
sub channelization low rate coding and power
boosting and deboosting features. It also
enables real-time application of flexible
frequency reuse where frequency reuse one
applied to terminals close to the cell center
whereas a fraction of frequency is used for
terminals at the cell edge, thereby reducing
heavy co-channel interference.
V. KEY MAC FEATURES
The MAC layer of mobile WiMAX (802.16e)
technology includes the following features
which provide for high efficiency and
flexibility.
A. Connection-based Data Transmission
with Classification and QoS per
Connection
The WiMAX technology provides an
environment for connection-oriented services.
For each service, certain classification rules are
specified to define the category of traffic
associated with the connection. For example, it
could be Internet Protocol (IP) traffic destined
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for a specific IP address/port. For each
connection, certain QoS parameters are
defined, for example, the minimum reserved
rate and maximum sustained rate. There are
several types of scheduling such as real-time
services that can be applied based on the
application requirements. A special scheduling
type (ertPS) is defined for the VoIP service
with silence suppression and adaptive codec.
B. Scheduled Transmissions and the
Flexible Bandwidth Allocation
Mechanism
Bandwidth allocation mechanism is based on
real time bandwidth requests transmitted by
the terminals, per connection. Bandwidth
requests may be transmitted using a contention
based mechanism or they can be piggybacked
with the data messages. The Base Station
executes resources allocation based on the
requests and QoS parameters of the
connection.
C. MAC Overhead Reduction
WiMAX technology includes support of the
general Purpose Header Suppression (PHS)
and IP Header Compression (ROHC). PHS can
be used for packets of virtually any format
such as IPv4 or IPv6 over Ethernet. It is
beneficial if a considerable part of the traffic
has identical headers which are typical for IP
or Ethernet destination addresses. The PHS
mechanism replaces the repeated part of the
header with a short context identifier, thus
reducing the overhead associated with headers.
ROHC is a highly efficient IETF standard for
which WiMAX MAC has all necessary
support.
D. Mobility Support: Handover
Handover procedures include numerous means
of optimization. In particular, to reduce time
expenses for the mobile to find the central
frequency and acquire parameters of the
neighbor base station, the mobile can apply a
scanning process when the mobile is away
from the serving base station to scan the
wireless media for neighbor base stations.
Information collected during scanning such as
central frequencies of the neighbor base
stations can then be used in actual handover. In
some deployment scenarios, scanning can be
performed without service interruption. For
this purpose, information about the central
frequency and parameters of the neighbor base
stations is periodically advertised by the
serving base station. To shorten the time
needed for themobile to enroll into the new
cell the network is capable of transferring the
context associated with the mobile from the
serving base station to the target base station.
All of these provide a potential for high
optimization in terms of handover latency.
Under ideal conditions the interval of service
interruption may be as short as several 5 ms
frames. The specific handover optimization
scheme used in a particular handover depends
on the information available to the mobile.
E. Power Saving: Sleep Mode
Sleep mode is the primary procedure for power
saving. In sleep mode the mobile is away from
the base station for certain time intervals,
normally of exponentially increasing size.
During these intervals the mobile remains
registered at the base station but can power
down certain circuits to reduce power
consumption.
F. Power Saving: Idle Mode
If the mobile has no traffic for a long time it
can switch to idle mode in which it is no
longer registered at any particular base station.
To resume traffic between the network and the
mobile, a paging procedure may be used by the
network.
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VI. MERITS OF WiMAX:
The WiMAX standard is beneficial to every
link in the broadband wireless chain, such as
consumers, operators, and component makers.
A. Consumers
• Receive services in areas that were
previously out of the broadband loop.
• More players in the market translate
into more choices for receiving
broadband access services.
B. Operators
• Wireless systems significantly reduce
operator investment risk.
• Common platform drives down costs,
fosters healthy competition, and
encourages innovation.
• Enables a relatively low initial CAPEX
investment and incremental
expenditures that reflect growth.
• No more commitments to a single
VIII. SUGGESTION TO REDUCE COSTS
vendor, a typical by-product of the
USING BEAMFORMING TECHNIQUES:
proprietary technology model.
C. Equipment Vendors
• Concentrate on specialization (i.e., BSs
or CPEs); there is no need to create an
entire end-to-end solution as in a
proprietary model.
• Standards-based, common platform
fosters rapid innovation and the
addition of new components and
services.
D. Component Makers
• Standardization creates a volume
opportunity for chip-set vendors/silicon
suppliers.
VII. DEMERITS:
1. Though the data speeds of 70 Mbps
and transmission distance of up to 50
km radius can be achieved individually,
they cannot be accomplished
simultaneously.
2. The data rate of 70 Mbps is just the
data rate of the Base Station and the
actual subscriber data rate may be
many times lower.
3. OFDM, is used to divide the available
broadband wireless channel into a large
number of narrowband orthogonal
subcarriers. This enables OFDM
systems to combat the effects of the
channel frequency selectivity with low
receiver complexity. Unfortunately,
OFDM is very sensitive to time
variations of the wireless channel.
Channel time variations destroy the
orthogonality of the OFDM subcarriers
and cause energy to leak from one
subcarrier to the adjacent subcarriers.
The inter carrier interference (ICI)
caused by this energy leakage severely
degrades the performance of OFDM,
and introduces an irreducible error
floor.
A. Beamforming
Beamforming is a signal processing
technique used in sensor arrays for
directional signal transmission or
reception. This spatial selectivity is
achieved by using adaptive or fixed
receive/transmit beam patterns. The
improvement compared with an
omnidirectional reception/transmission
is known as the receive/transmit gain
(or loss). Beamforming takes
advantage of interference to change the
directionality of an array. When
transmitting, a beamformer controls the
phase and relative amplitude of the
signal at each transmitter, in order to
create a pattern of constructive and
destructive interference in the
wavefront. When receiving,
information from different sensors is
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combined in such a way that the

expected pattern of radiation is
preferentially observed.

Figure 5: MIMO System

Generally speaking, Space-Time Block Coding

Figure 4: BF Systems
As shown in Figure 4, by weighting the signal
streams, the Base Station (BS) forms a narrow
wave beams which points to the direction of
aim user while suppress the interference signal
from non-aim user, as a result, both Array
Gain and Co-channel Interference Reduction
Gain could be implemented. As we know, BF
transmits only one data stream at a time and
there is no multiplexing gain and diversity
gain. Especially when the channel condition is
good, multiplexing gain is the main bottleneck
for system and BF is not the best choice to
improve the system throughput.
(STBC) is the proper technology to achieve the
Spatial Diversity Gain while Space
Multiplexing (SM) is for the Multiplexing
Gain in MIMO system. As shown in Figure
5(a), STBC offers redundancy in the spatial
dimensions by transmitting a signal on more
than one antenna during two time slot. For the
spatial Multiplexing, as shown in Figure 5 (b),
it sends a different signal on each time-
frequency resources of each antenna, could
multiply spectrum efficiency without
additional spectrum resources. As SM is a
better technique, we restrict our study to that
alone from now onwards.
C. BF+MIMO Enabled WiMAX:

B. MIMO
In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output, or
MIMO, is the use of multiple antennas at both
the transmitter and receiver to improve
communication performance. It is one of
several forms of smart antenna technology. Figure 6: MIMO +BF
There are two important MIMO types, based
on the number of signals transmitted: MIMO+BF can enhance system coverage and
a. Space-Time Block Coding (STBC) and improve the cell edge user throughput, which
b. Space Multiplexing (SM) reduce network construction and maintenance
costs greatly.
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D. Technical Requirement for
BF+MIMO:
In order to implement the MIMO+BF, the
system needs to satisfy the following
condition：
1. Both the BS and MS should support the
dedicated pilot
2. Both the BS and MS should support the
MIMO technology
3. The MS is configured more than one
receive antennas in the SM+BF
scenario.
4. To get better performance, the MS
should support one or two antennas to
send Sounding signal. (At present,
there is no MS support the Sounding
technology.)
E. Performance
1. Increase the received signal strength of
each stream.
2. MIMO+BF can enhance system
coverage and improve the cell edge
user throughput, which reduce network
construction and maintenance costs
greatly.
F. Demerits:
Initial high cost, which can be overseen
by the numerous benefits it provides
us.
IX. CONCLUSION:
WiMAX, with all its challenges and
opportunities, is an unavoidable part of our
future. WiMAX has the potential to be a true
business enabler. The possibilities with this
technology are numerous. It will lead to great
advances in the commercial field. The
researchers are filled with optimism, and
products based on this technology are
beginning to emerge. The extent to which
WiMAX will impact our lives only depends on
the limits of human imagination. It can rightly
be said that WiMAX is slowly but steadily
ushering in the next revolution. Though the
technology is still under standardization
process for use in chipsets, antenna, and other
devices, the experts expect it to be a killer.
And the proposed suggestion of combining
MIMO and BF systems, if and when
implemented properly, would add to the
benefits of WiMAX
XI. REFERENCES:
1. Auerbach, “WiMAX- A Wireless
Technology Revolution - Oct 2007”
2. “WiMAX: Applications” by Syed
Ahson & Mohammad Ilyas
3. “WiMAX Technologies,
Performance Analysis, and
QoS”
4. “Performance Analysis of Fast
Handover Schemes in IEEE
802.16e Broadband Wireless
Networks” by Liping Wang,
Yusheng JI & Fuqiang LIU.
5. http://www.WiMAX.com/
6. http://www.intel.com/technolog
y/WiMAX/
7. http://www.ieee802.org/16/
8. http://www.WiMAX-
industry.com/WiMAXwhitepape
rs.htm