A proactive forward error control scheme for mobile WiMAX communication

The IEEE 802.16 standard, also known as WiMAX, has yet to prove its effectiveness when the end terminals are not static and free to move at vehicular speeds. High bit error rate caused by multipath fading at high vehicular speeds, is the key reason for low throughput at high speeds. Standard error control mechanisms like transmission control protocol (TCP) and forward error correction (FEC) have limited impact on the overall throughput at vehicular speeds. In this paper, we propose a proactive FEC scheme that adjusts the FEC code size based on the estimated bit error rate at various vehicular speeds. We show a mathematical model to estimate the bit error rate in WiMAX communication. We then propose a FEC scheme to proactively compute the FEC code size. We simulated the proposed scheme for a centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the base stations. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to existing schemes.