Testing of fixed broadband wireless systems at 5.8 GHz

The advent of 802.16-2004 standard for wireless metro area network (MAN) has created interest amongst telecom service providers. Equipment manufacturers are already marketing point-to-point and point-to-multipoint broadband wireless systems in the 5.8 GHz unlicensed band for fixed applications. Before deploying on a large scale, a precise estimate of capacity and coverage of these systems is needed. This report gives an insight on expected throughput and performance for equipment based on 802.16-2004, using TDD, OFDM, 256 FFT, and many of the WiMAX choices made for use at 5.8 GHz. Tests are setup in different environments, in the lab and outdoors: we first report on a study in a controlled lab environment, where radio multipaths and fades are generated by a channel emulator, simulating Stanford University Interim (SUI) channel models; then the same radio system is tested for throughput in a suburban area in Denver. The two experiments are compared.