An Analytical Approach to Qualitative Aspects of WiMAX Physical Layer

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. IEEE 802.16/WiMAX is a new network which is designed with quality of service in mind. This paper focuses on the comparison of quality of service parameters between different channels in WiMAX physical layer. Orthogonal frequency division multiple access is used by WiMAX on its physical layer. Orthogonal frequency division multiple access uses adaptive modulation technique on the physical layer of WiMAX and it uses the concept of cyclic prefix that adds additional bits at the transmitter end. The signal is transmitted through the channel and it is received at the receiver end. Then the receiver removes these additional bits in order to minimize the inter symbol interference, to improve the bit error rate and to reduce the power spectrum. In the analysis, a WiMAX module developed based on popular network simulator MATLAB is used.