Investigating the distance effects on performance degradation of fixed WiMax technology using NCTUns tool

WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is an emerging wireless communication system that can provide wireless broadband access with high data throughput over long distance in a point-to-multipoint and line of sight or non-line of sight environment. There are two main classes of WiMAX called Fixed and Mobile WiMAX. The research objective is to evaluate the performance of Fixed WiMax network within the sub urban area by simulating several scenarios. The scenarios were created based on the changes of system parameters which are base station's antenna height and distance between Base Station (BS) and Subscriber Station (SS). The research is conducted by an open source simulator called NCTUns 5.0, developed by National Chiao Tung University. The Fixed WiMAX topology has been tested and the percentages of data rate degradation with the effects of system parameters were analyzed. Finally, the results obtained show that the performance degrades gracefully with the increasing distance between BS and SS. It is also concluded that 25 meters BS antenna is optimal enough to cover up to 5000 meters area because there is no significant change in the data rate when 50 meters antenna tower is applied.