Propagation Model and Network Simulator for Stationary and Nomadic WiMAX Networks

Broadband wireless access is emerging as one of the hottest areas of growth within mobile communication. It enables users to enjoy the same QoS they have at home, in the office or wherever they go. WiMAX is an innovative technology, which is specified in IEEE 802.16. Members of the WiMAX- forum are currently testing the first WiMAX equipments. The first commercial mobile WiMAX products are expected to be introduced into the market in the first quarter of 2007 and will be followed in the second half of the year by equipment with advanced multiple antenna capabilities - MIMO and beam forming - for higher throughput and capacity. For the planning of WiMAX networks, the investigation of radio transmission in and into buildings is getting more important. Therefore a new approach for the prediction of the field strength in hybrid scenarios (urban and indoor) is used. The prediction concept does not rely only on the direct ray (like empirical models) and it does not consider hundreds of rays for a single radio link (like ray tracing). The new model focuses on the most dominant path between transmitter and receiver. It allows the computation of the transition from an urban to an indoor scenario and vice versa, thus it is ideally suited for the planning of WiMAX networks.