Performance analysis of IEEE802.16 based cellular MAN with OFDM-256 in mobile scenarios

The recent IEEE802.16d/e standardization initiative for wireless metropolitan area networking (MAN) aims at portable and mobile broadband wireless access (BWA) in cellular deployments as well as conventional fixed residential high throughput access (e.g. wireless DSL) and feeding applications such as IEEE802.11 WLAN hotspot backhaul. This paper focuses on the basic IEEE802.16d/e performance presenting end-to-end application throughput, capacity and spectrum efficiency figures for pure mobile scenarios. Detailed link level and system level simulations have been performed in interference limited cellular environment for tight 1x1 and 1x3 frequency reuse showing very promising results on 3.5 MHz OFDM channels (256 sub-carriers) in the 3.5 GHz band. The dependency of the application throughput, channel utilization and coding scheme distribution on the system load has been thoroughly analyzed. It is shown that admission control functionality is mandatory for a system in 1x1 reuse to avoid overload and packet call blocking conditions, whereas 1x3 reuse works properly over the entire system load range.