Performance & capacity of mobile broadband WiMAX (802.16e) deployed via High Altitude Platform

This paper investigates the performance and capacity of a WiMAX 802.16e cellular system deployed via High Altitude Platform (HAP WiMAX) through extensive simulations. HAP WiMAX link performance is evaluated for a wide range of channel conditions in terms of elevation angle and signal to noise ratio (SNR) through a comprehensive link level simulator based on 802.16e. The obtained results are then used to investigate HAP WiMAX cellular system performance in terms of user capacity, cell throughput and Grade of Service (GoS) by modelling a multi cellular scenario. The performance is evaluated for frequency reuse of 1 and 3 with and without Adaptive Coding and Modulations (ACM) for two different user data rates. Simulation results show that, cell throughputs as high as 3.6 Mbps per cell can be achieved for 5MHz channel bandwidth while attaining an acceptable GoS with a minimum frequency reuse of 3 in a HAP WiMAX 802.16e system.