WiMAX System Performance with Multiple Transmit and Multiple Receive Antennas

In this paper, the performance of WiMAX networks using multiple transmit and multiple receiver antennas are analyzed via system simulations. For downlink, two kinds of technologies are studied: i) open loop: where the base station has no knowledge of channel and uses mobile mode selection feedback to switch between single data stream STBC and multi-stream spatial multiplexing MIMO (SM-MIMO); ii) closed loop: where base station has explicit knowledge of downlink channel and transmits using adaptive beamforming. This paper compares the WiMAX downlink system performance using open loop and closed loop MIMO technologies with various frequency reuse factors and different data traffic models. The performance of WiMAX uplink is also analyzed with multiple receive antennas and using both single input multiple output (SIMO) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO, a.k.a. SDMA).