Downlink Spectral Efficiency of Mobile WiMAX

Abstract

Mobile WiMAX is an OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) mobile broadband air interface defined by the IEEE 802.16 family of standards and promoted by the WiMAX Forum as a solution to the requirements for mobile Internet services. Mobile WiMAX employs a number of radical enhancements, such as scalable OFDMA and advanced antenna techniques as basic features, compared to existing mobile technologies. This paper presents the results of extensive simulations to evaluate the downlink performance of mobile WiMAX employing MIMO. The results show that the use of OFDMA, large channel bandwidths, and MIMO techniques enables mobile WiMAX to provide a spectrally efficient cellular communications system suitable for broadband wireless services.