The Demand And Utilization Of Digital Network

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a wireless networking standard that is specially designed for addressing interoperability based on IEEE 802.16 products. WiMAX also defines a wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN), where the users get connected to the main station of broadband wireless provider. It incorporates the feature of both line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) communication and is alternative technology to be deployed in urban areas where cables, DSL or T1 has not yet been implemented. There are other wireless technologies like IEEE 802.11, known as wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi). which also provided wireless connectivity to the end users with very low range, mobility, bandwidth and quality of service. WiMAX is a better solution than Wi-Fi for providing wireless connectivity in urban areas due to its exceptional bandwidth, quality of service and mobility.

WiMAX can be compared with many other wireless solutions like Wi-Fi, 3G, Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) or Long Term Evolution (LTE). They are all competing technologies and evolving daily with something new. UMTS offers very high mobility but does not provide enough bandwidth for data rate. WiMAX provides high data rate with very limited data rate. WiMAX on the other hand lies in between Wi-Fi and UMTS, thus providing sufficient bandwidth and mobility for the end users (Insert citation).

Wi-Fi or WLAN is a wireless standard capable of offering data rate up to 54 Mbps at 5.2 GHz frequency band./* Needs to mention which standard provides this data rate*/ IEEE 802.11b which operates in the frequency band of 2.4 GHz supports data rate of up to 11 Mbps. These technologies are capable of providing coverage around 100 meter radius and have a 20 MHz fixed channel bandwidth. Wi-Fi can be deployed in two ways, infrastructure mode and ad-hoc mode. In infrastructure mode the end users connect to the Wi-Fi network via the access point (AP). The AP is responsible for providing IP address, data rate and mobility. In ad-hoc mode each end users connect with each other without the need of AP. There are many limitations on deploying this technology because of its range, quality of service and data rate (Insert citation here also). The biggest challenge in Wi-Fi network is that the wireless signal is very sensitive to an external interference which cannot be controlled by the system administrator, thus very unreliable to implement. For an example, as the user changes its location or move far from the base station, the data rate starts dropping and finally reaches 0 at certain point which in-turns reduces the quality of service which has greater impact in voice and video conferencing. The only advantage of using Wi-Fi is because of the cost associated with its deployment. These practical limitations can be highly reduced with the implementation of WiMAX which has numerous advantages over the Wi-Fi.

WiMAX being wireless broadband solution offers various features along with flexibility. Some of the salient features of WiMAX that cannot be neglected are its physical layer based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), high data rate, quality of service, mobility support scalability, adaptive modulation and coding, link layer retransmission, support for advanced antenna technology, security and last but not the least Internet Protocol (IP) based architecture.

WiMAX is capable of providing service range of up to 30 miles so that the users can connect directly with the base station without requiring the line of sight. It provides a bandwidth of 70 Mbps for downlink and uplink, which can be considered to be enough bandwidth to support more than 50 businesses running simultaneously and supports more than thousand homes that are running at 1-Mbps DSL connectivity as well. The initial WiMAX standard, IEEE 802.16 operates in the frequency range of 10- to 66-GHz. Later 802.16a added support to operate in the frequency range of 2 to 11-GHz, for which most of the parts has already been unlicensed internationally, and the requirement of domestic license for few of them is still remaining to acquire. Because of licensing issue most of the business will probably deploy 802.16a standard. The WiMAX is an enhanced and improved version and is one of the latest technologies that will overlap the limitations of the Wi-Fi standard by providing extended bandwidth, range and security. (Bathich, Baba & Ibrahim, 2012).

The new WiMAX standard delivers the downlink speed of more than 128 Mbps and uplink speed of 56 Mbps in 20 MHz bandwidth. WiMAX update IEEE 802.16m is expected to offer bandwidth of at least of 1 Gbps for fixed and 100 Mbps for mobile users. The key strength to choose WiMAX is that it uses the approach similar to that of cell phone thus no line of sight is required. The signal broadcasted by the WiMAX is not prone to interference, it is more secure with good quality of service and the most important is its reliability.

The deployment cost associated with the WiMAX is very high as compared to Wi-Fi because the internet service provider (ISP) will have to deploy the WiMAX tower in various location of the city in order to provide full coverage. Once deployed each WiMAX tower can communicate with other WiMAX tower without the use of wires. This eventually saves the cost associated with the wired implementation and similarly the users can directly communicate with the WiMAX tower form their end-devices like laptop, pda, tablets, mobile phones etc. Users do not need to install any wireless devices in their home like Wi-Fi routers or modems and get rid of those clumsy cables hanging all around. This proves that WiMAX is very reliable, scalable and stable backbone network for providing the internet service to their users. (Chou, C.M., Li, C.Y, & Lan, K.C.,2009).

Since the bandwidth and range associated with WiMAX is very high as compared to the Wi-Fi, we can conclude that WiMAX is able to provide very high quality of service and is scalable to support enough users without any drop in the bandwidth. WiMAX is more reliable as the WiMAX signal is not prone to noise and interference. Thus with all these features WiMAX proves to be the best possible solutions for wireless connectivity specially in urban areas. Further research needs to be ………………… ……… ……..