Performance Evaluation of a Deployed WiMAX System Operating in the 4.9GHz Public Safety Band

This paper presents an evaluation of a deployed WiMAX system operating in the 4.9 GHz Public Safety Band in the City of Tulsa. The study includes propagation analysis for the coverage and network performance tests to demonstrate the viability of a WiMAX system as a medium for public safety. We considered existing propagation models in the UHF band (300 MHz to 3 GHz) to be applied to 4.9 GHz and compared the characteristics predicted by the models with the measured data. The results show that of the three models presented, the Cost-231 Hata Model best predicts the characteristics of the deployed WiMAX system. Network performance tests were also conducted to measure the throughput of the system at various adaptive modulation rates.