WiMAX Technology
WiMAX is a standards-based technology enabling the
delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to
cable and DSL. WiMAX will provide fixed, nomadic, portable and,
eventually, mobile wireless broadband connectivity without the need
for direct line-of-sight with a base station. In a typical cell
radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified™
systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per
channel, for fixed and portable access applications. This is enough
bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with
T1/E1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed
connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up
to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up
to three kilometers. It is expected that WiMAX technology will be
incorporated in notebook computers and PDAs in 2006, allowing for
urban areas and cities to become “MetroZones” for portable outdoor
broadband wireless access.
How WiMAX Works
WiMAX is designed to deliver broadband multimedia
data ubiquitously over wireless links at several times the speed of
traditional circuit-switched wireless systems, and over a far
greater coverage area than todays proprietary wireless local network
(WLAN) access solutions, such as 802.11 (WiFi) technology.
Where WiFi enables affordable broadband Internet access within
short-range hot spots, at distances measured in tens of meters,
WiMAX is designed to deliver the same access at similar costs, but
across tens of kilometers and ultimately, with greater performance
and higher speeds. In short, where WiFi provides high bandwidth but
not distance, and current cellular systems provide distance, but not
high bandwidth, WiMAX will provide both.
WiMAX will give users uninterrupted and untethered access to a rich
variety of high-bandwidth services not only around offices, homes,
coffee shops, airports, and hotels, but also as users roam in rural,
suburban, and metropolitan areas.
Whats more, with WiMAX, users will no longer perceive wireless
Internet access as being inferior in quality compared with todays
fixed DSL and cable access offers. Instead, WiMAX is expected to
bring long-sought-after performance parity between wireless and
wired Internet access.
These capabilities are possible because the standard upon which
WiMAX technology is based IEEE 802.16 is being designed from the
ground up to be truly broadband and packet based. A
non-line-of-sight technology, IEEE 802.16e (the e refers to the
mobile version of the standard) is based on orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) and OFDM with multiple access (OFDMA),
a new air interface that brings significantly improved levels of
spectral efficiency, data throughput, and capacity compared to
previous generations of radio technologies. Moreover, when combined
with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna processing
technology, the resulting OFDM-MIMO combination can boost capacity
and performance even further.
Links
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WiMAX from Wikipedia
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WiMAX
Forum
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WiMAX Forum White Papers
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WiMAX Forum Technical Documents & Specifications
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Wireless Network-Wikipedia
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