A novel mobile WiMAX solution for higher throughput

The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX, has emerged as an exciting technology for broadband wireless communications with potentials to offer high throughput and support high bandwidth demanding applications. WiMAX, however, has yet to prove its effectiveness when the end terminals are not fixed and have the capacity to move from one place to another at different speeds. Recent studies suggest that while WiMAX (802.16e) has the potential to deliver a data rate up to 75 Mb/s for fixed wireless communications, it fails drastically for mobile wireless communications, often providing a data rate less than 1 Mb/s when the mobile nodes travel at high speeds, which offers a huge challenge for QoS management. Multipath fading that causes high bit error rate at the receiver end is a key reason for low throughput at high speed. Bit error rate and maximum packet size determine the packet error rate, and error recovery for higher number of corrupted packets is not always an attractive option for many real-time applications with delay and jitter constraints. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to estimate the bit error probability when the mobile station travels at different speeds. The estimated value of bit error probability is then taken into account to proactively compute the appropriate maximum packet size that offers the best chance to achieve improved throughput at different operating conditions. We simulated the proposed scheme for a centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the base stations. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to other standard schemes.