Performance evaluation and improvement of the OFDM-based Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

IEEE802.16 is a new generation wireless broadband network standard. This standard mainly targets technology and specification for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WirelessMANs), including the physical layer and medium access control layer. They are intended for fixed broadband wireless access systems providing multimedia services. There are broadly applicable systems operating between 2 and 66 GHz. This paper is motivated to study the system performance of WirelessMANs under various system parameters and to propose a channel estimation scheme to improve its performance. We verify the performance under different channel coding and modulation schemes in the specification, such as under different Reed- Solomon coding choices and convolution coding rates as well as different QAM modulation choices. After exploiting possible solutions in the specifications and performance evaluated, we propose a new channel estimation technique that is found useful in resolving the severe impact from multipath fading.