Performance Evaluation of a Deployed WiMAX System Operating in the 4.9GHz Public Safety Band

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of a deployed WiMAX system operating in the 4.9GHz Public Safety Band in the City of Tulsa. The study includes propagation analysis for the coverage and network performance tests to demonstrate the viability of a WiMAX system as a medium for public safety. We considered existing propagation models in the UHF band (300 MHz to 3 GHz) to be applied to 4.9 GHz and compared the characteristics predicted by the models with the measured data. The results show that of the three models presented, the Cost-231 Hata Model best predicts the characteristics of the deployed WiMAX system.Network performance tests were also conducted to measure the throughput of the system at various adaptive modulation rates.

Electromagnetic propagation environment effects on the WiMAX communication system

“…The Tab. 6 shows the values of path loss at 3 km distance in rural environment. In this environment, at 2m receiver antenna height, SUI model showed the lowest path loss prediction (153,8dB).…”

“…This model is useful for WiMAX systems with small cells, BS at low heights and high frequencies. The SUI model is optimized for a frequency of 1.9 GHz [6]. The correction parameters are allowed to extend this model up to 3.5 GHz band [4].…”

“…WiMAX is a certification mark for products based on the IEEE 802.16 standard [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] this system is a telecommunications technology which enables wireless transmission of voice and data and provide wireless access in urban, suburban and rural environment with non line of sight (NLOS) propagation [2]. This scenario of propagation introduce multipath, which decreases the signal strength [3].…”

“…Bachir Belloul [2] studied the performance of co-located WiMAX transmitter sites operating at 2.5 and 3.5GHz. Nickolas LaSorte [6] presents an evaluation of a deployed WiMAX system operating in the 4.9GHz Public Safety Band in the City of Tulsa.…”

Performance Evaluation of WiMAX System in Various Morphological Scenarios

“…In addition to the theoretical evaluation, there has been also experimental evaluation for deployed WiMAX networks. For instance in [7], the performance evaluation of a fixed WiMAX network deployed in the city of Tulsa, OK, USA, at the 4.9GHz public safety band was presented. In these previous works, there was no consideration for some important factors that can affect the behavior of the WiMAX system, for instance different cell radii and how it is related to noise-limited versus interference-limited scenarios, and what the optimal cell radius for a particular environment could be.…”