WiFi Networking: Radio Wave Basics

Spread Spectrum

After modulating the digital signal into an analog carrier signal using FSK, PSK, or QAM, some WLAN transceivers
spread the modulated carrier over a wider spectrum to comply with regulatory rules. This process, called spread
spectrum , significantly reduces the possibility of outward and inward interference. As a result, regulatory bodies
generally do not require users of spread spectrum systems to obtain licenses. Spread spectrum, developed
originally by the military, spreads a signals power over a wide band of frequencies (see Figure 2-8 ).

Spread spectrum radio components use either direct sequence or frequency hopping for spreading the signal.
Direct sequence modulates a radio carrier by a digital code with a bit rate much higher than the information signal
bandwidth. Figure 2-9 is a hypothetical example of direct sequence that represents the transmission of three data
bits (101) serially in time. The actual transmission is based on a different code word that represents each type of
data bit (1 and 0). As shown in the figure, when sending a data bit 1, the radio sends the code word 00010011100
to represent the data bit. Similarly, when sending a data bit 0, the radio sends the code word 11101100011. The
increase in the number of bits sent that represents the data effectively spreads the signal across a wider portion of
the frequency spectrum.

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WiMAX - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX[8/9/2017 11:22:03 AM]
Physical layer
The original version of the standard on which WiMAX is based (IEEE 802.16) specified a
physical layer
operating in the 10 to 66 GHz range. 802.16a, updated in 2004 to 802.16-2004, added
specifications for the
2 to 11 GHz range. 802.16-2004 was updated by 802.16e-2005 in 2005 and uses
scalable orthogonal
frequency-division multiple access[17] (SOFDMA), as opposed to the fixed orthogonal
frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM) version with 256 sub-carriers (of which 200 are used) in 802.16d.
More advanced
versions, including 802.16e, also bring multiple antenna support through MIMO. (See
WiMAX MIMO) This
brings potential benefits in terms of coverage, self installation, power consumption,
frequency re-use and
bandwidth efficiency. WiMax is the most energy-efficient pre-4G technique among LTE
and HSPA+.[18]
Media access control layer
The WiMAX MAC uses a scheduling algorithm for which the subscriber station needs to
compete only once
for initial entry into the network. After network entry is allowed, the subscriber station
is allocated an access
slot by the base station. The time slot can enlarge and contract, but remains assigned
to the subscriber
station, which means that other subscribers cannot use it. In addition to being stable
under overload and
over-subscription, the scheduling algorithm can also be more bandwidth efficient. The
scheduling algorithm
also allows the base station to control Quality of Service (QoS) parameters by balancing
the time-slot
assignments among the application needs of the subscriber station.
IEEE 802.16 - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.16[8/9/2017 11:22:39 AM]
802.16e-2005 Technology
The 802.16 standard essentially standardizes two aspects of the air interface the
physical layer (PHY) and
the media access control (MAC) layer. This section provides an overview of the
technology employed in
these two layers in the mobile 802.16e specification.
PHY
802.16e uses scalable OFDMA to carry data, supporting channel bandwidths of between
1.25 MHz and
20 MHz, with up to 2048 subcarriers. It supports adaptive modulation and coding, so
that in conditions of
good signal, a highly efficient 64 QAM coding scheme is used, whereas when the signal
is poorer, a more
robust BPSK coding mechanism is used. In intermediate conditions, 16 QAM and QPSK
can also be
employed. Other PHY features include support for multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) antennas in order
to provide good non-line-of-sight propagation (NLOS) characteristics (or higher
bandwidth) and hybrid
automatic repeat request (HARQ) for good error correction performance.
Although the standards allow operation in any band from 2 to 66 GHz, mobile operation
is best in the lower
bands which are also the most crowded, and therefore most expensive.[3]
MAC
The 802.16 MAC describes a number of Convergence Sublayers which describe how
wireline technologies
such as Ethernet, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Internet Protocol (IP) are
encapsulated on the
air interface, and how data is classified, etc. It also describes how secure
communications are delivered, by
using secure key exchange during authentication, and encryption using Advanced
Encryption Standard
(AES) or Data Encryption Standard (DES) during data transfer. Further features of the
MAC layer include
power saving mechanisms (using sleep mode and idle mode) and handover
mechanisms.
A key feature of 802.16 is that it is a connection-oriented technology. The subscriber
station (SS) cannot
transmit data until it has been allocated a channel by the base station (BS). This allows
802.16e to provide
strong support for quality of service (QoS).
WiMAX Networking Technologies and Solutions - ZTE Corporation
http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/endata/magazine/ztecommunications/2005year/no2/articles/200506/t20050622_162338.html[8/9/2017 11:38:18 AM]
(3) IEEE 802.1x is a port-based network access control standard. The port access will be stopped once the
authentication fails. IEEE 802.1x is safe, simple and easy to operate. Therefore, IEEE 802.1x is a priority
solution for the AAA of the WiMAX network.
WiMAX MAC Layer | Media Access Control | Radio-Electronics.Com
http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/wireless/wimax/mac-layer.php[8/9/2017 7:28:05 PM]
The WiMAX MAC layer has to meet a number of requirements:
Point to multipoint: One of the main requirements for WiMAX is that it must be possible for a base
station to
communicate with a number of different outlying users, either fixed or mobile. To achieve this, the IEEE
802.16,
WiMAX MAC layer is based on collision sense multiple access with collision avoidance, CSMA/CA to
provide the
point to multipoint, PMP capability.
Connection orientated:
Supports communication in all conditions: The WiMAX MAC layer must be able to support a large
number of
users along with high data rates. As the traffic is packet data orientated it must be able to support both
continuous
and" bursty" traffic. Most data traffic is "bursty" in nature having short times of high data rates then
remaining
dormant for a short while.
Efficient spectrum use: The WiMAX MAC must be capable of supporting methods that enable very
efficient use
of the spectrum.
Variety of QoS options: To provide the support for different forms of traffic from voice data to Internet
surfing, etc,
a variety of different classes and forms of QoS support are needed. Support for QoS is a fundamental
part of the
WiMAX MAC-layer. The WiMAX MAC utilises some of the concepts that are embedded in the DOCSIS
cable
modem standard.
Multiple WiMAX / IEEE 802.16 physical layers: With different variants, the WiMAX MAC layer must be
able to
provide support for the different PHYs
Simulating the WiMAX Physical Layer in Rayleigh Fading Channel

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. WiMAX Physical Layer

3. WiMAX Physical Layer Simulator

4. Simulation Results

5. Conclusion and Further Work

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. Introduction

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, known as WiMAX, is a

wireless networking technology which aims for addressing interoperability
across IEEE 802.16 standard-based products; it includes the definition of the
medium access control (MAC) and the physical (PHY) layer. The IEEE 802.16e is
designed to provide system for mobile broadband access.
The MAC layer is an interface between PHY layer and network architecture. It
has a connection-oriented architecture that is designed to support a variety of
applications, including voice and multimedia services. The system offers
support for constant bit rate, variable bit rate, real-time, and non-real-time
traffic flows, in addition to best-effort data traffic. WiMAX MAC is designed to
support a large number of users, with multiple connections per terminal, each
with its own quality of service (QoS) requirement.
The multiple accesses of users are realized by adjacent and distributed sub-
carriers permutations which are defined to formulate sub-carriers to sub-
channel mapping for various diversity options: Full Usage of Sub-channels
(FUSC), Tile Usage of Sub-carriers (TUSC), Partial Usage of Sub-channels
(PUSC) and Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC). For the separation of the
Down Link (DL) and Up Link (UL) transmissions, the standards IEEE 802.16-
2004 and IEEE 802.16e-2005 support both time division duplexing (TDD) and
frequency division duplexing (FDD), as well as a half-duplex FDD, which allows
for a low-cost system implementation. TDD is preferred in the majority of
implementations because of its advantages such as flexibility in choosing
uplink-to-downlink data rate ratios and the ability to exploit channel
reciprocity. For connections that require enhanced reliability, WiMAX supports
automatic retransmission requests (ARQ) at the link layer level. ARQ-enabled
connections require each transmitted packet to be acknowledged by the

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Simulating the WiMAX Physical Layer in Rayleigh Fading Channel

receiver; unacknowledged packets are assumed to be lost and are

retransmitted. WiMAX also optionally supports hybrid-ARQ, which is an
effective hybrid between forward error correction (FEC) and ARQ.
The basics of the PHY layer in WIMAX are presented in Section II. The
proposed simulator is described in Section III. Some simulation results are
presented and commented in Section IV. The last Section is dedicated to
conclusions and further work objectives.

2. WiMAX Physical Layer

The WiMAX physical layer is based on the orthogonal frequency division

multiplexing (OFDM), which is the transmission scheme of choice to enable the
high-speed data, video, and multimedia communications. OFDM is an elegant
and efficient scheme for high data rate transmission in non-line-of-sight
(NLOS) or multi-path radio environment.
The transmitted base-band signal, which is an ensemble of the signals in all the
sub-carriers, can be represented as:
(1)
where S[l] is the symbol carried on the lth sub-carrier; Bc is the frequency
separation between two adjacent sub-carriers, also referred to as the sub-
carrier bandwidth; f is the frequency of the first sub-carrier; and T is the total
useful symbol duration (without the cyclic prefix). At the receiver, the symbol
sent on a specific sub-carrier is retrieved by integrating the received signal
with a complex conjugate of the tone signal over the entire symbol duration T.
If the time and the frequency synchronization between the receiver and the
transmitter are perfect, the orthogonality between the sub-carriers is preserved
at the receiver. When the time and/or frequency synchronization between the
transmitter and the receiver is not perfect, the orthogonality between the sub-
carriers is lost, resulting in inter-carriers interference (ICI). Timing mismatch
can occur due to misalignment of the clocks at the transmitter and the receiver
and propagation delay of the channel.
Frequency mismatch can occur owing to relative drift between the oscillators
at the transmitter and the receiver and nonlinear channel effects, such as
Doppler shift. The flexibility of the WiMAX PHY layer allows one to make an
optimum choice of various PHY layer parameters, such as cyclic prefix length,
number of sub-carriers, sub-carrier separation, and preamble interval, such
that the performance degradation owing to inter-symbol interference (ISI) is
minimal without compromising the performance. The concept of independently
modulating multiple orthogonal frequency tones with narrowband symbol
streams is equivalent to first constructing the entire OFDM signal in the
frequency domain and then using an inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) to

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Simulating the WiMAX Physical Layer in Rayleigh Fading Channel

convert the signal into the time domain. The IFFT method is easier to
implement, as it does not require multiple oscillators to transmit and receive
the OFDM signal. In the frequency domain, each OFDM symbol is created by
mapping the sequence of symbols on the sub-carriers.
The available sub-carriers may be divided into several groups of sub-carriers
called sub-channels. Sub-channels may be constituted using either contiguous
sub-carriers or sub-carriers pseudo randomly distributed across the frequency
spectrum. Sub-channels formed using distributed sub-carriers provide more
frequency diversity, which is particularly useful for mobile applications. WiMAX
defines several sub-canalization schemes based on distributed carriers for both
the uplink and the downlink.
Several permutation types are defined by the standard, suited for different
purposes. FUSC makes full usage of the achievable frequency diversity: any
available sub-carrier within the whole spectrum may be allocated to any sub-
channel. PUSC firstly splits the available sub-carriers in several groups
(segments). The sub-carriers are then mapped to sub-channels within every
segment, independently. This approach is still oriented to frequency diversity,
and allows a kind of virtual sectorization: different regions of the cell will
correspond to different segments. The PUSC sub-canalization is mandatory for
all mobile. By coordinating planning, the neighbor cells may use the same
frequency band, the segmentation allowing reducing the interference.
AMC is the name given to an adjacent permutation: the sub-carriers that
compose the sub-channels are adjacent in the spectrum. This approach reduces
the complexity and is well suited for channels that change slowly in time.
Channel estimation is easier due to the fact that carriers are adjacent and
consequently the link adaptation becomes simpler too, which explains the
name given to this permutation.
Although frequency diversity is lost, band AMC allows system designers to
exploit multi-user diversity, allocating sub-channels to users based on their
frequency response. Multi-user diversity can provide significant gains in overall
system capacity, if the system strives to provide each user with a sub-channel
that maximizes its received signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR). In
general, contiguous sub-channels are more suited for fixed and low-mobility
applications. The WiMAX PHY layer is also responsible for slot allocation and
framing over the air. The minimum time-frequency resource that can be
allocated by a WiMAX system to a given link is called a slot.
Each slot consists of one sub-channel over one, two, or three OFDM symbols,
depending on the particular sub-canalization scheme used. Fig. 1 shows an
OFDMA and OFDM frame when operating in TDD mode.
Figure 1. A sample TDD frame structure for Mobile WiMAX

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Simulating the WiMAX Physical Layer in Rayleigh Fading Channel

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What is Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)? - Definition from WhatIs.com

through an access point (a station that transmits and receives data, sometimes known as a transceiver).
The access point requests identification (ID) data from the user and transmits that data to an
authentication server. The authentication server asks the access point for proof of the validity of the ID.
After the access point obtains that verification from the user and sends it back to the authentication
server, the user is connected to the network as requested.

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