Bit Error Rate Analysis in WiMAX Communication at Vehicular Speeds Using Nakagami-m Fading Model

High speed wireless communication technologies such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) have revolutionized the way of our day-to-day communication and opened opportunities for many innovative applications. The 802.6m version of WiMAX offers data rates up to 1 Gbps for fixed communications and supports mobility up to 350 km/h. While WiMAX technology´s capacity to deliver high data rates in a fixed environment is beyond any doubt, the standard is not fully optimized yet for mobile communication at high vehicular speeds. At high vehicular speeds, rapid changes in surrounding environments, cause severe fading at the receiver, resulting a drastic fall in throughput and unless any proactive measure is taken to combat this problem, throughput becomes insufficient to support many applications, particularly those with multimedia contents. Bit Error Rate (BER) estimation is an integral part of any proactive measure and recent studies suggest that Nakagami-m model performs better for modeling channel fading in wireless communications at high vehicular speeds. No work has been reported in literature that estimates BER at high vehicular speeds in WiMAX communication using Nakagami-m model. In this paper, we develop and present an analytical model to estimate BER in WiMAX at vehicular speeds using Nakagami-m fading model. The proposed model is adaptive and can be used with resource management schemes designed for fixed, nomadic, and mobile WiMAX communications.