A Novel Mobile WiMAX Solution for Higher Throughput

Abstract— The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX,

has emerged as an exciting technology for broadband wireless

communications with potentials to offer high throughput and

support high bandwidth demanding applications. WiMAX,

however, has yet to prove its effectiveness when the end terminals

are not fixed and have the capacity to move from one place to

another at different speeds. Recent studies suggest that while

WiMAX (802.16e) has the potential to deliver a data rate up to 75

Mb/s for fixed wireless communications, it fails drastically for

mobile wireless communications, often providing a data rate less

than 1 Mb/s when the mobile nodes travel at high speeds, which

offers a huge challenge for QoS management. Multipath fading

that causes high bit error rate at the receiver end is a key reason

for low throughput at high speed. Bit error rate and maximum

packet size determine the packet error rate, and error recovery

for higher number of corrupted packets is not always an

attractive option for many real-time applications with delay and

jitter constraints. In this paper, we propose a mathematical

model to estimate the bit error probability when the mobile

station travels at different speeds. The estimated value of bit

error probability is then taken into account to proactively

compute the appropriate maximum packet size that offers the

best chance to achieve improved throughput at different

operating conditions. We simulated the proposed scheme for a

centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the

train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the

base stations. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves

significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to

other standard schemes.

Keywords- Wireless communication, WiMAX, throughput, bit

error rate.