Design and implementation of tiny-WiMAX connection manager (t-WCM) for specific purposed devices

WiMAX network services cannot generally be provided for special purpose devices such as credit card systems and surveillance systems since they are designed to operate only with WCM which should be installed on personal computer/smart card (PC/SC) with Windows platform. In this paper, we propose a design and implementation technique called tiny-WiMAX connection manager (t-WCM) for non-PC/SC WCM to provide WiMAX services to special purpose devices. The t-WCM is composed mainly of three units; WiMAX module control unit (WCU), data surveillance unit (DSU), and external device program unit (EPU). It also has TCP/IP protocol stack and RTOS kernel, and performs data transmission between external end user's device and remote server system over WiMAX networks. For the performance evaluation of the proposed t-WCM, we have implemented the t-WCM and tested it under a commercial mobile WiMAX network environment. From the experimental results, the t-WCM is verified to show almost equal stability and delay performances with the legacy WCM and xDSL, and especially better than 1xEV-DO. As a result, it has a strong possibility to apply the t-WCM to many types of special purpose embedded systems, and consequently to provide various WiMAX network services to them.