Analysis of Quality of Service (QoS) in WiMAX networks

In last few years there has been significant growth in the area of wireless communication. Quality of Service (QoS) has become an important consideration for supporting variety of applications that utilize the network resources. These applications include voice over IP, multimedia services, like, video streaming, video conferencing etc. IEEE 802.16/WiMAX is a new network which is designed with quality of service in mind. This paper focuses on analysis of quality of service as implemented by the WiMAX networks. First, it presents the details of the quality of service architecture in WiMAX network. In the analysis, a WiMAX module developed based on popular network simulator ns-2, is used. Various real life scenarios like voice call, video streaming are setup in the simulation environment. Parameters that indicate quality of service, such as, throughput, packet loss, average jitter and average delay, are analyzed for different types of service flows as defined in WiMAX. Results indicate that better quality of service is achieved by using service flows designed for specific applications.