Performance of IEEE 802.16 OFDMA Standard Systems in Airport Surface Area Channels

Ever increasing demands for communication on airport surface areas have led to studies of new systems feasible for use in these environments. The IEEE 802.16e standard systems can be considered potential candidates for these areas because of their many attractive features, which include high data rate, mobility support, etc. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an 802.16e system with the OFDMA air interface over non-stationary channel models developed for different airports. We first provide a brief introduction to the various non-stationary channel models. Next we provide a short overview of 802.16e and describe three potential channel estimation schemes. We then evaluate the performance of the 802.16e system over the proposed non-stationary channel models. We show that the proposed channel estimation methods allow good tradeoffs between channel estimation accuracy and computational complexity. Finally, we introduce a subcarrier based subcarrier based scheduling algorithm aimed to maximize the system throughput under proportional fairness, and evaluate its performance over the proposed non-stationary channel models.