Performance analysis of 3G and WiMAX as cellular mobile technologies

In this paper, performance analysis of 802.16/WiMAX and 3G technologies is done considering both as a cellular mobile technology. The performance measures used for this analysis are path loss, signal to noise ratio, coverage range of a cell and capacity in terms of number of user supported. An example scenario is considered as a reference. Different parameters for this scenario are assumed and adopted from literature. This paper evaluates the potential of WiMAX as a cellular technology in comparison to existing cellular networks evolving from analog (1 G), digital (2 G), digital network with high speed (2.5 G) and transmission with high data rate (3 G). At the end concluding that there is trade off between different network parameters.